In Heien v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court held 8-1 that a search or seizure can be lawful under the Fourth Amendment despite its being founded on a government agent’s mistake of law, as long as the mistake was “reasonable.” The gist of the opinion was symmetry: Just as probable cause and reasonable suspicion do not require the police to be correct about the facts, but merely to have the right level of justified factual suspicion, these objective standards do not require the police to be correct about the law, but only to have a reasonable belief about what the law forbids. Plausible sounding as it may be, Heien is a riches of embarrassment. The symmetry reasoning is superficial, as it ignores or fails to grasp the power of obvious counterarguments I explore here, including: (1) A search or seizure based on a mistake of law is the joint result of executive and legislative action; viewing a government as a whole, mistakes of law are never reasonable because a reasonable legislature writes criminal statutes clearly enough to allow reasonable police officers to know what the law is. (2) Indeed, a state legislature can hardly be said to provide citizens with constitutionally sufficient “fair notice” of criminal prohibitions if the meaning of a criminal statute is so ambiguous that we cannot even expect law enforcement officers to get the law right. (3) Just as reasonable “ignorance of the criminal law is no excuse” for citizens, it should not excuse or empower government officials, especially not for mistakes about the law they are tasked with enforcing. (4) The issue in Heien arises almost entirely in the context of traffic enforcement, which is the very last place in criminal law where the Court should grant the police an extra dose of discretion. We might summarize these four points with the simple proposition that government, being the creator of law, is always limited in power by the law it actually creates, a principle which distinguishes government mistakes of law from governmental mistakes of fact. On reflection, Heien is a serious misstep for the rule of law.

中文翻译：

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足够接近政府工作？海恩对法治的不合理错误

在 Heien 诉北卡罗来纳州案中，最高法院以 8-1 的比分裁定，根据第四修正案，搜查或扣押是合法的，尽管其依据是政府代理人的法律错误，只要该错误是“合理的”。意见的主旨是对称的：正如可能的原因和合理的怀疑不要求警察对事实正确，而只需要有适当的合理的事实怀疑水平，这些客观标准并不要求警察是正确的关于法律，但只对法律禁止的事情有合理的信念。尽管听起来似乎有道理，但 Heien 是一个令人尴尬的财富。对称性推理是肤浅的，因为它忽略或未能掌握我在这里探讨的明显反驳的力量，包括：(1) 基于法律错误的搜查或扣押是行政和立法行为的共同结果；将政府作为一个整体来看，法律的错误从来都不是合理的，因为合理的立法机构制定了足够清晰的刑事法规，让合理的警察知道法律是什么。(2) 事实上，如果刑事法规的含义如此含糊，以至于我们甚至不能指望执法人员正确对待法律，就很难说州立法机构向公民提供了宪法上充分的关于刑事禁令的“公平通知”。(3) 正如公民的合理“对刑法的无知不是借口”一样，它不应该为政府官员提供借口或授权，尤其是不应该为他们执行的法律错误提供借口。(4) Heien 案的问题几乎完全是在交通执法的背景下出现的，这是刑法中最后一个法院应该授予警察额外自由裁量权的地方。我们可以用一个简单的命题来概括这四点，即政府作为法律的创造者，其权力总是受到其实际创造的法律的限制，这是区分政府法律错误与政府事实错误的原则。回想起来，海恩是对法治的严重失误。将政府的法律错误与政府的事实错误区分开来的原则。回想起来，海恩是对法治的严重失误。将政府的法律错误与政府的事实错误区分开来的原则。回想起来，海恩是对法治的严重失误。