No Reason for the Reasonable Person: Feminist Lessons from the Fourth Amendment

Abstract

This Article questions the universal reasonableness, objectivity, and a-perspectivity that the reasonable person standard and its specific application purport to embody. It aims to expose the inherent arbitrary and artificial construction of the 'reasonable person,' so that its maintenance can no longer be justified on grounds of rational, coherent, and bright guidelines. Once the logical analytical foundations of the reasonable person standard break down, feminist theories suggest that the courts maintain the fiction of the reasonable person as a mechanism of perpetuating patriarchy and subordinating women and others.

Keywords: feminist jurisprudence, Fourth Amendment, search and seizure, privacy, reasonable person, subordination