Riley Says Get a Warrant — So Why Are Schools Skipping That Step?

Introduction

This past April, the Fourth Circuit held in O.W. v. School Board of the City of Virginia Beach that an assistant principal’s warrantless search of a 13-year-old’s cellphone in the presence of school police officers did not violate the student’s Fourth Amendment rights, even though the student would be charged with a crime.[1] This case demonstrates a large and generally unremarked upon problem in Fourth Amendment law: lower courts are declining to apply the heightened privacy protections for cellphones established in the pivotal Supreme Court case of Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014). This refusal runs the risk of improperly constricting students’ constitutional rights. On July 31, 2026, O.W. asked the Supreme Court to review the case, teeing up a crucially important case for students’ privacy and constitutional rights.

Often wrongly considered to be cabined to searches incident to arrest, Riley called on lower courts to reevaluate each exception to the warrant requirement when a cellphone is the subject of a search. Despite the Supreme Court’s instruction, courts are consistently declining to analyze whether warrantless cellphone searches in schools are justified. Often, courts neglect to cite to Riley at all.

The constitutional rights of students must be clarified, especially now that 96% of adolescents will own a smartphone by age 14.[2] This is particularly important as schools increasingly partner with law enforcement to search and discipline students, which can disproportionately harm students belonging to marginalized groups and lead to life-changing criminal charges. When courts treat student cellphone searches that involve law enforcement as a typical administrative locker sweep, they sidestep the Supreme Court’s recognition of cellphones’ unique privacy interests and misinterpret the basis of the school search warrant exception.

Riley v. California directed lower courts to re-examine traditional exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement when cellphones are the subject of a search

Riley v. California is a landmark case in which the Supreme Court unanimously held that “a warrant is generally required” before the government may search the data on a cellphone on the person of someone being arrested (also known as a search incident to arrest).[3] But the Court’s reasoning reached far beyond just searches incident to arrest, a fact that has seemed to escape many lower courts.

A quick primer on Fourth Amendment searches and exceptions.

Reasonableness is the touchstone of whether a search is constitutional. The Fourth Amendment protects the public from “unreasonable” searches and seizures. Searches performed without first obtaining a search warrant are considered presumptively unreasonable unless an exception applies. In other words, the Fourth Amendment imposes a “warrant requirement” to which there are some exceptions.

Exceptions to the warrant requirement reflect situations where the Supreme Court has recognized that it would be unreasonable to require the government to obtain a warrant. Exceptions include searches incident to arrest, searches under exigent (i.e., emergency) circumstances, searches to which someone has consented, or—relevant to O.W.—searches conducted in administrative contexts for non-law-enforcement matters such as in schools. The Supreme Court has recognized these exceptions over time by balancing the severity of the privacy intrusion against the government interest at stake.

Once a categorical exception has been recognized, it can be applied in any case in which it is relevant. In other words, courts don’t need to re-balance the interests at stake every single time the government claims that its warrantless search fits one of the recognized exceptions: as long as the context truly matches one of the recognized exceptions, then the search was permissible.

The relevant exception in Riley was a search incident to arrest. Under this exception, police are permitted to conduct warrantless searches of someone’s person and immediate surroundings during an arrest. The Supreme Court’s balancing test permits searches incident to arrest: the government’s justification is that these warrantless searches protect officer safety (by potentially disarming the suspect) and preventing the destruction of evidence, while a person’s privacy interest is allegedly diminished because they are already being arrested.

For decades, courts had more-or-less mechanically applied the search incident to arrest exception. Riley marked a notable shift where the Court recognized that the extraordinary nature of digital devices necessitated re-evaluating whether the search incident to arrest exception makes sense. But, while directly about searches incident to arrest, Riley’s language and rationale sweeps more broadly.

Riley’s holding.

The Riley Court prohibited police from searching the contents of a suspect’s cellphone without a warrant during a typical search incident to arrest. More broadly, it requires courts to reassess each exception to the warrant requirement when cellphones are searched to determine whether applying the exception serves the original justification of the exception. Court can find the exception still justified when applied to cell phones, but they must do the analysis.

First, the Court noted that while the search incident to arrest exception could be automatically applied for physical objects, a reevaluation was necessary for cellphone data. Cellphones were both relatively new and ubiquitous: they “are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy. A smart phone of the sort taken from Riley was unheard of ten years ago; a significant majority of American adults now own such phones.”[4] Because phones are ubiquitous, new, and obviously involve heightened privacy interests, the Court deemed a re-balancing necessary.

On the privacy interest side of the ledger, the Court recognized that cellphones involved much stronger privacy interests than most physical objects. Modern cellphones host huge amounts of sensitive personal data. The Court observed that cellphones are a “persistent and pervasive part of daily life” which contain “vast quantities of information literally in the hands of individuals.”^[5] The Court noted that cellphones also connect to cloud storage, meaning that searching a cellphone really means searching through the entirety of a person’s digital life. Thus, cellphone searches are particularly invasive.

Next, the Court noted that the government’s interests in conducting a warrantless search were lower for cellphones than for physical objects. Traditionally, warrantless searches incident to arrest were ruled reasonable for two main reasons: officer safety and preventing the destruction of evidence. These searches enabled officers to protect themselves by searching for and removing weapons from an arrested person’s possession and they helped officers discover relevant evidence that the arrested person could easily destroy. But the Court noted that neither of these justifications made sense for cell phone data, which “cannot itself by used as a weapon to harm an arresting officer.”[6] Similarly, destruction of evidence is not a concern because “once law enforcement officers have secured a cell phone, there is no longer any risk that the arrestee himself will be able to delete incriminating data from the phone.”[7]

Based on this rationale, the Court concluded that a warrant is required to search a cellphone seized incident to an arrest.

This decision is fundamentally broad. The case involved a search incident to arrest, but the Court’s language and rationale swept more broadly. The Court described at length the extreme privacy interests inherent in cellphones. If that is true in the context of a search incident to arrest, why would it not be true in the contexts of other exceptions? That is not to say that no exceptions can ever apply when a cellphone is searched. As the Court states, “other case-specific exceptions may still justify a warrantless search of a particular phone.”[8] But this language still implies that warrantless cellphone searches must be “justified,” presumably through the analysis exemplified by Riley. Lower courts should follow the Supreme Court’s direction and analyze whether or not other warrant requirement exceptions categorically apply to highly intrusive cellphone searches by rebalancing the interests at stake.

No court, including the Fourth Circuit in O.W., has heeded Riley’s call to evaluate whether it is reasonable to search a student’s cellphone without a warrant.

Since the Riley decision was handed down in 2014, lower courts have not thoroughly assessed how cellphone searches fare under a key exception to the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement: searches of students in school. Only a handful of cases involving the search of a student’s cellphone have explicitly considered whether or not Riley should apply in these circumstances. Each court that has considered applying Riley to protect against warrantless searches of student cellphones has ultimately rejected it.

Many courts have, unfortunately, ignored Riley when evaluating warrantless searches of students’ cellphones.[9] Instead, courts consistently and mechanically apply the traditional, pre-cellphone procedure for  student searches established by the Supreme Court case New Jersey v. T.L.O. in 1985.[10] Under T.L.O., warrants are generally not required for school administrators to conduct searches of students on school property. This is based on reasonableness: school administrators have a serious need to maintain safety and discipline that would be thwarted by needing to obtain a search warrant every time they wanted to search a student’s possessions. As long as the search in question was reasonably limited in scope and justified at inception, i.e., if the school administrator believed that a search would likely uncover evidence of a school policy violation, then it is valid without a warrant under T.L.O.

The O.W. took the approach of more-or-less automatically applying T.L.O. instead of considering whether to reevaluate the exception’s applicability when it comes to cellphones.[11] The court rejected Riley’s relevance and wrote that T.L.O. already conducted the relevant balancing of student privacy expectations against the school’s interests when it was decided in 1985, and a new evaluation of the interests at stake in cellphone searches is unnecessary. This overlooks the Riley Court’s recognition that cellphones’ heightened privacy interests necessitate re-evaluating pre-cellphone caselaw instead of automatically applying it to cellphone searches. The O.W. court said that “students’ privacy interests with respect to their cell phones are somewhat curtailed” under the school district’s policies, but the court did not thoroughly analyze whether this curtailment fits with Riley’s recognition of the heightened privacy interest in cellphones, especially when law enforcement is closely involved in their search.[12]

The Fourth Circuit is not the only court to rule this way.[13] Every court to have at least mentioned Riley in this context has declined to follow Riley’s instruction. Their primary reasons are a misreading of Riley that cabins it to the search-incident-to-arrest context combined with the allure of avoiding the merits of the question and ruling on qualified immunity doctrine, instead.

In Jackson v. McCurry, the Eleventh Circuit indicates that “a search of a student’s cellphone might require a more compelling justification than that required to search a student’s other personal effects under T.L.O.”^[14] However, due to “permissible disagreement about the implications of Riley for school searches,” the court concludes that a reasonable school official could assume that Riley does not apply to student searches and proceeds to grant qualified immunity.

Out of the six cases that cite to or discuss Riley in the context of student cellphone searches, five ultimately rule in favor of the school officials and/or school district based on qualified immunity or municipal liability standards. The only remaining case involves a juvenile criminal appeal for evidence suppression rather than a civil lawsuit. The rationale these cases use to grant qualified or municipal immunity is often heavily linked to their reasons for rejecting Riley: overcoming qualified immunity and municipal immunity both require the plaintiff to prove that a clear violation of a constitutional right occurred, and courts in these cases all conclude that Riley did not clearly establish that warrantless student cellphone searches are always a Fourth Amendment violation. 

Qualified immunity in student cellphone search cases may be granted to school administrators or SROs if the search passes the T.L.O. reasonableness test or if it was otherwise objectively reasonable for the school official to believe their actions did not violate the constitution. This was the case in Singh v. Sachem Central School District, where the court decided it was unclear if the cellphone search was reasonable. Still, the court rejected the plaintiff’s arguments that school defendants should be denied qualified immunity based on Riley, concluding that the facts of the instant case were too different from Riley and “there is no precedent that establishes a student’s right to be free from cell phone searches in the public-school context, particularly during an investigation into a perceived threat of violence against the school.”[15] 

Courts seem especially resistant to applying a warrant requirement for student cellphone searches when the operative case implicates school safety issues. When the search in question was based on credible tips of potential school violence (such as students sharing images, texts, or memes that seemed to threaten a school shooting) or are otherwise motivated by student security concerns (such as the possible spread of child sexual abuse materials), then courts point to such facts as additional rationale to either reject Riley’s relevance altogether, or to conclude that these cases count under the exigent circumstances exception to warrant requirements that Riley identified as sometimes justifying warrantless cellphone searches.^[16]

School disciplinary searches that integrate law enforcement exceed the school search justifications in T.L.O. and pose a severe threat to kids’ constitutional rights.

In O.W., a thirteen-year-old’s phone was searched without a warrant in the presence of a police officer, uncovering evidence that was used to criminally charge him (though the charges were later dropped). This is an untenable situation for students, who should not be found to have fewer civil rights and liberties protections than adults, especially in a context such as the school setting where adults are assumed to be acting with their wellbeing in mind.

This is not just wrong from a matter of policy, but also law. Even if Riley did not exist, courts would be wrongly applying T.L.O. when condoning warrantless searches of cell phones in school when those searches involve law enforcement.

In T.L.O., the Supreme Court narrowly cabined its justification for a school search exception to situations not involving law enforcement but, instead, school discipline. The Court’s reasoning is grounded in the special needs of the school environment, since getting a warrant before searching a student would “unduly interfere” with the “swift and informal disciplinary procedures needed in the schools.”[17] This warrant requirement exception prioritizes the school’s interest in maintaining administrative order over a student’s privacy as long as the administrator has a good justification and conducts the search reasonably. However, T.L.O.’s warrant exception for student searches should not govern in cellphone search cases like O.W.’s.

First, the decision in T.L.O. is explicitly limited to “searches carried out by school authorities acting alone and on their own authority,” and avoids ruling on “the appropriate standard for assessing the legality of searches conducted by school officials in conjunction with or at the behest of law enforcement agencies.”[18] As such, T.L.O. should not apply when law enforcement is closely involved in a student search.

Police are increasingly present in modern American schools. Almost 60% of schools regularly hosted a law enforcement officer (usually called a school resource officer, or SRO) on school property in 2018, a significant jump from around 1% of schools in 1975.[19] Research shows that SROs in schools leads to greater racial and ethnic disparities in discipline (including expulsions and suspensions) and more frequent escalations of minor disciplinary issues into criminal charges.[20] Some school districts, including the Virginia Beach City Public School system where O.W. attended middle school, have policies that require administrators to notify SROs of possible criminal activity.[21] Since many criminal matters would almost certainly pose a school disciplinary issue as well (such as drug use or the exchange of explicit photos of other students), such policies mean that law enforcement and administrators frequently search students together with dual purposes.

In O.W. and similar cases, law enforcement is generally highly involved with the cellphone search, sometimes literally watching over the shoulder of a school administrator as they scroll through the child’s private messages, photos, and files. O.W.’s phone was searched to investigate the exchange of sexual images between middle schoolers, which qualifies as child sexual abuse materials even when both parties are underage. While O.W.’s assistant principal was the one physically looking through the cellphone, the accompanying police officer acted as a partner to the search, even instructing the assistant principal on handling the phone after evidence was found.[22] Since this was a search in conjunction with law enforcement, it goes beyond the warrantless administrative searches authorized in T.L.O., since the ruling only applied to “school authorities acting alone”[23] to carry out school disciplinary procedures.

Second, Riley recognized that the general public has a strong privacy interest in their cellphones. Students are part of that general public. Even though minors generally have more limited Fourth Amendment protections while at school, their privacy rights are not nonexistent. T.L.O. maintains that students still have some legitimate expectation of privacy and declines to treat schools like prisons for Fourth Amendment purposes.[24] Maintaining Fourth Amendment protections for minors under investigation for criminal activity is crucial. When law enforcement participates in the warrantless search of a student’s cellphone, that is a clear violation of the student’s Fourth Amendment rights unless another relevant exception to the warrant requirement controls.

Conclusion

For the sake of students’ rights and the proper application of one of its most important recent cases, the Supreme Court should agree to hear O.W.’s case and should overturn the Fourth Circuit. The school search exception to the warrant requirement has important limits that are violated when law enforcement is involved. And even when law enforcement involvement is necessary, courts should properly perform a Riley-style analysis to ensure that warrantless searches only happen when absolutely necessary. Unless there is an immediate exigent need, any school that partners with law enforcement to search a student cellphone should follow Riley’s ultimate command for cellphone searches during arrest: “get a warrant.”[25]

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The author would like to thank Megan Iorio, Tom McBrien, and Abi Kunkler for their feedback and editing of this post.

[1] O.W. v. Carr, 172 F.4th 337 (4th Cir. 2026).

[2] Nina Shapiro, New Study Looks At Young Adolescents Who Own Smartphones, Forbes (Feb. 12, 2026), https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninashapiro/2026/02/12/new-study-looks-at-young-adolescents-who-own-smartphones/.

[3] Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373, 401 (2014).

[4] Id. at 385.

^[5] Id. at 385–86.

[6] Id. at 387.

[7] Id. at 388.

[8] Id. at 401–02.

[9] See, e.g., In re Rafael C., 200 Cal. Rptr. 3d 305 (Cal. Ct. App. 2016); DeCossas v. St. Tammany Par. Sch. Bd., No. CV 16-3786, 2017 WL 3971248 (E.D. La. Sept. 8, 2017); Jackson v. McCurry, 762 F. App’x 919 (11th Cir. 2019); Piechowicz v. Lancaster Cent. Sch. Dist., No. 17-CV-845-LJV-LGF, 2022 WL 17540648 (W.D.N.Y. Dec. 8, 2022); Singh v. Sachem Cent. Sch. Dist., No. 20-CV-00146 (ERK) (LKE), 2025 WL 1616622 (E.D.N.Y. June 6, 2025); O.W. v. Carr, 172 F.4th 337 (4th Cir. 2026).

[10] New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325 (1985).

[11] O.W. v. Carr, 172 F.4th at 349–50.

[12] Id. at 352.

[13] See, e.g., In re Rafael C., 200 Cal. Rptr. 3d 305 (Cal. Ct. App. 2016); DeCossas v. St. Tammany Par. Sch. Bd., No. CV 16-3786, 2017 WL 3971248 (E.D. La. Sept. 8, 2017); Jackson v. McCurry, 762 F. App’x 919 (11th Cir. 2019); Piechowicz v. Lancaster Cent. Sch. Dist., No. 17-CV-845-LJV-LGF, 2022 WL 17540648 (W.D.N.Y. Dec. 8, 2022); Singh v. Sachem Cent. Sch. Dist., No. 20-CV-00146 (ERK) (LKE), 2025 WL 1616622 (E.D.N.Y. June 6, 2025); O.W. v. Carr, 172 F.4th 337 (4th Cir. 2026).

^[14] Jackson v. McCurry, 762 F. App’x 919, 927 (11th Cir. 2019).

[15] Singh v. Sachem Cent. Sch. Dist., No. 20-CV-00146 (ERK) (LKE), 2025 WL 1616622 at 18 (E.D.N.Y. June 6, 2025).

^[16] Singh v. Sachem Cent. Sch. Dist., No. 20-CV-00146 (ERK) (LKE), 2025 WL 1616622 at 18 (E.D.N.Y. June 6, 2025); In re Rafael C., 200 Cal. Rptr. 3d 305, 313–14 (Cal. Ct. App. 2016).

[17] New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325, 340 (1985).

[18] Id. at 341 n.7.

[19] Chelsea Connery, The Prevalence and the Price of Police in Schools, U. Conn. Today (Oct. 27, 2020), https://today.uconn.edu/2020/10/the-prevalence-and-the-price-of-police-in-schools/

[20] Id.

[21] Memorandum of Understanding, O.W. v. School Board of the City of Virginia Beach et al., No. 2:21-cv-448 (E.D. Va. 2023), ECF No. 109 ¶ 60.

[22] JA1027 (Dep. Tr. Of O.W., at 47:10–22); JA492.

[23] New Jersey v. T.L.O., 469 U.S. 325, 341 n.7 (1985).

[24] Id. at 338–39.

[25] Riley, 573 U.S. at 403.