Terry v. Ohio at Thirty: A Revisionist View

In this Article, I suggest that, while the Warren Court provided a needed tool to police, it failed to achieve its stated purpose of tying the practice to the Fourth Amendment reasonableness standard. First, the Court failed to adequately define an investigatory stop, leading later courts to harden the definition, eliminating the Fourth Amendment from most on-the-street police-citizen encounters. Second, the facts in Terry failed to meet the reasonableness standard Chief Justice Warren purported to apply and which subsequently has been further weakened in later cases. Finally, the decision in Terry failed to strike a meaningful Fourth Amendment balance between effective law enforcement and individual freedom