A Phone’s Map and an Unwritten Exclusion

The setup

In May 2019 an armed robber took about $195,000 from a Virginia credit union, and the police had surveillance video but no suspect.[1] They obtained a geofence warrant, an order directing Google to identify every device its records placed inside roughly a 150-meter circle around the bank at the time of the robbery.[1] Google’s Location History, when a user turns it on, logs a phone’s position about every two minutes to within some twenty meters, far finer than the cell-tower data courts had confronted before.[1] Through a staged process the company narrowed and then unmasked a handful of users, among them Okello Chatrie, whose phone had entered the zone minutes before the robbery.[1] He moved to suppress the evidence.

The question

The Court granted review on a single, narrow question: whether obtaining that Location History is a search under the Fourth Amendment at all.[3] The answer was not obvious. The data sat with a third party, Google, and under the long-standing third-party doctrine information handed to an outside company usually loses its constitutional shelter.[5] The government pressed that only about two hours of data were at issue, well short of the long-term tracking the Court had worried about in its 2018 Carpenter decision.[1]

The reasoning, walked

In a 6–3 decision written by Justice Kagan, the Court held that acquiring Location History is a search.[1][2] It reasoned outward from Carpenter, which had already held that comprehensive cell-site location records deserve protection even though a carrier holds them.[1] Location History, the Court observed, is more revealing than the data in Carpenter, not less: more precise, more frequent, detailed enough to place a person inside a particular building.[1] It set aside the government’s duration argument, reasoning that once the Fourth Amendment applies it does not turn on how many hours of data are seized, because even short stretches of movement expose a wealth of private association.[1] And it declined to let the third-party doctrine decide the case, noting that Google repeatedly prompts users to keep the setting on, so switching it on is not the kind of knowing surrender that forfeits protection.[1] The Court did not rule the warrant valid or invalid; it vacated the decision below and returned the case to weigh probable cause and particularity, leaving the exclusionary-rule question for another day.[1][4]

The splits

The judgment drew a cluster of separate writings.[1] Justice Gorsuch agreed with the result but would have set aside the reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test altogether, treating the location log as Chatrie’s own property, an electronic diary of his travels that he could review, edit, and delete.[1] Justice Jackson would have gone further than the majority, flagging that the warrant let officers widen the data pull without returning to a judge.[1] In dissent, Justice Alito would have found no search at all, warning that the majority supplied no limiting principle and that records held by a company are not the target’s to shield.[1] Justice Barrett wrote separately that the narrow question risked an advisory opinion.[1]

What turns on it

This is the first time the Court has ruled on geofence warrants, and it carries Carpenter from live cell-site tracking into the stored, high-resolution location databases that phones and apps accumulate.[6][7] In practice, police demands that ask a company to reverse-search who was near a place now clearly require a warrant.[6] The reasoning is strongest where it reads Carpenter a fortiori, arguing that if coarse tower data was protected then a finer, denser log must be.[1] It is weakest where the dissents press hardest, on the line itself: the Court says the amendment applies without saying how much data or which technology trips it, and it handed the harder reasonableness questions back to the court below.[1][7] The three-way split over whether privacy should rest on expectations or on property is the deeper current here, and it will outlast this case.[1]

The setup

Four civil suits alleged that minors had been trafficked at a Philadelphia hotel and that the hotel companies negligently failed to stop it.[1] The hotels carried commercial general liability policies, the ordinary business coverage for negligence claims, issued over the years by several insurers.[1] One of them, Samsung Fire & Marine, went to federal court seeking a declaration that it owed the hotels nothing, neither a defense nor payment, on the theory that Pennsylvania’s public policy against trafficking makes such conduct uninsurable.[1][3] A federal district court agreed and entered judgment for the insurers.[1] On appeal, the federal Third Circuit did not answer the state-law question itself but certified it to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, which ruled on July 21, 2026.[1][2]

The question

An insurer’s duty to defend and its duty to indemnify are creatures of contract, measured by comparing the allegations in a complaint against the words of the policy.[1] The insurers asked the court to override that contract on public-policy grounds, leaning on a 2004 Pennsylvania decision, Greenfield, that had refused coverage tied to dealing hard drugs.[1] The question was whether the state holds an overriding public policy against trafficking strong enough to void an insurer’s contractual duties, even though nothing in these particular policies excluded such conduct.[1] The intuitive pull ran toward the insurers, since trafficking is at least as grave as drug dealing and the legislature has criminalized it.[1]

The reasoning, walked

The court declined to let the gravity of the allegations rewrite the contract.[1] It anchored both duties in the policy language, the duty to defend being the broader one, triggered whenever a complaint alleges harm at least potentially within coverage.[1] Then it removed the foundation of the insurers’ argument: the Greenfield decision they relied on was only a three-justice plurality, which under Pennsylvania law sets no binding precedent.[1] To rule for the insurers, the court reasoned, it would have to first adopt that non-binding rationale and then extend it beyond drugs to trafficking, and it declined to do either.[1] The load-bearing move was about the role of a court: judges, it held, should not rank the relative wickedness of the crimes in the penal code to decide which ones quietly void insurance.[1] That the legislature has criminalized conduct tells a court the conduct is harmful; it does not license judges to graft new exclusions onto private contracts.[1] Insurers weigh such risks for a living and can write a trafficking exclusion and price it accordingly, the court noted, and it refused to act as what it called a super-scrivener, inserting the exclusion they had not.[1][5] Because the two duties rise and fall together, public policy abrogated neither; the court answered the certified question in the negative and returned the case for the coverage arguments it had reserved.[1]

What turns on it

Justice Wecht, joined by Justice McCaffery, agreed with the judgment but wrote separately, a signal of divergent reasoning within an otherwise unanimous court.[1] The ruling is a first answer, now binding in Pennsylvania, to a question spreading through the courts as liability suits against hotels and other businesses over trafficking multiply.[3][4] It confines the older Greenfield case to its facts and lays down a clear rule: Pennsylvania courts will not manufacture public-policy coverage bars, so the contest moves to whether an insurer wrote an explicit exclusion.[5]

Set beside the geofence case, the pair shows appellate reasoning holding a line against a natural temptation. In one the pull was technological, the sense that data left with a company must be fair game; in the other it was moral, the sense that no one should have to insure a terrible harm. Each court refused to let that pull do the work the rule assigns elsewhere: the Fourth Amendment applies on its own terms regardless of how the data was gathered, and an insurance exclusion has to be drafted rather than felt. Where the geofence majority reasoned by analogy, carrying one precedent forward onto new facts, the coverage court reasoned by restraint, refusing to extend a precedent that was never binding to begin with. It is analysis of legal reasoning, not legal advice.