WHAT THE COURTS
ARE DOING.
Council votes can be reversed at the next election. A constitutional ruling binds every jurisdiction in the circuit. This tracks the lawsuits: who is suing, in which court, on what claim, and where it actually stands, with the filings themselves linked wherever they are public.
A complaint is one side's assertions, not a finding. Everything under “claim” is what was argued, never what is true. A pending appeal means nothing is settled, and where reporting disagrees about what a court actually did, that disagreement is recorded rather than resolved by guesswork. This is not legal advice.
- Decided on appealFourth Amendment
Chatrie v. United States
Supreme Court of the United States / No. 25-112 / United States
What is argued
That police acquisition of Google Location History through a geofence warrant was a Fourth Amendment search requiring constitutional protection.
What has happened
- The Supreme Court held 6 to 3 that acquiring Google Location History is a Fourth Amendment search, and that a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in it.
- The Court expressly declined to decide whether the warrant in this case was itself constitutional, remanding to the Fourth Circuit to consider probable cause and particularity.
Why it matters
Not a Flock case, and listed here because it is the doctrine the Flock cases now run on. It is also pending before the same circuit hearing Schmidt. It cuts against the argument that bulk location data is outside the Fourth Amendment simply because any single observation is public, which is close to the reasoning the Norfolk trial court used.
- On appealFourth Amendment
Schmidt v. City of Norfolk
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit / No. 26-1227 / Norfolk, Virginia
What is argued
That Norfolk's city-wide Flock network records and stores residents' movements without a warrant, and that this amounts to an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. Schmidt's vehicle was recorded 475 times in four months.
What has happened
- Complaint filed in the Eastern District of Virginia with Institute for Justice backing.
- Judge Mark Davis ruled for the City, holding the network did not require a warrant. He found captures infrequent and widely spaced, averaging 45 to 50 minutes and 2.5 to 3.5 miles apart, and distinguished Carpenter v. United States on that basis.
- ACLU, ACLU of Virginia and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief in the Fourth Circuit. The Cato Institute and EPIC also filed in support of the plaintiffs.
On the procedural posture: Secondary reporting describes the January ruling variously as a dismissal and as summary judgment for the city. Those are different procedural events. Until the order itself is read, this entry records only that the district court ruled for the City on 27 January 2026.
Why it matters
The most advanced constitutional challenge to a municipal Flock network. Norfolk ran 176 cameras across 75 clusters in 66 square miles on a 21-day rolling retention, which makes it a test of whether density and retention convert ordinary observation into a search.
STRAIGHT FROM
THE COURTS.
Pulled automatically from CourtListener, which mirrors federal dockets and published opinions. Nobody has read these. They are here because a filing should surface before somebody writes about it, not because they have been checked.
Most of this is not a lawsuit against Flock.A prosecution where licence plate reader evidence was contested is where the case law actually gets made, but it is a different thing from someone suing over a camera programme. Each row says which it is, worked out from the caption, so treat “Prosecution” rows as evidence disputes rather than challenges to a deployment.
Loading court records.
Records via CourtListener, a free service of the Free Law Project. Refreshed a few times a day.
Missing a case? Court records are public but scattered across dozens of dockets, and this tracker only holds what has been read and verified. If you know of a filing that belongs here, it belongs here. The sources and corrections policy applies to everything on this page.