Court Rules on Heat – Sensor Searches. A home marijuana grower was convicted after a search occasioned by a heat-sensing device detected the heat of his grow-lamps through his walls. Now the Supreme Court upholds his contention that the search violated his privacy; that it was more like an unreasonable search and seizure than it was like merely seeing something from outside the house. This surprising pro-privacy ruling came from a 5-4 majority which crossed ideological lines, uniting Scalia (who wrote the opinion) and his shadow Clarence Thomas with liberals Ginzburg, Souter and Breyer. The cynical, conspiratorial me suspects that they shuffled the alliances on this one — relatively inconsequential, in that it doesn’t hamper law officers with heat-sensing equipment too much to get a warrant for such a search — to deflect criticism about how fundamentally inflexible and divided the Court is. New York Times

The Court also ruled that, while a child born to an American mother is automatically a U.S. citizen, no such automatic right devolves upon a child born to an American father. As NPR put it, this was the first time in decades that the Court ruled along lines of a gender stereotype.