For decades, legal scholars have struggled with the problem of pretextual searches and seizures. These are defined as police using their power to stop or search or arrest for one crime, usually a minor crime, as a means of triggering the ability to search, without probable cause, for evidence of other crimes. That is, police might stop a person in order to conduct a Terry frisk, or arrest a driver for speeding in order to conduct a search-incident-to-arrest or an inventory search. Police may conduct them hoping to “get lucky” and find evidence of criminality. In short, when used pretextually, protective searches amount to discretionary searches unsupported by probable cause – precisely the government oppression that the Fourth Amendment was framed to protect citizens against. The United States Supreme Court, however, has made pretextual searches permissible under the Fourth Amendment as a result of its unanimous decision in Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806 (1996), which held that the subjective motivations of police are irrelevant as long as their conduct is objectively reasonable; therefore, reasonable suspicion of any crime will suffice to * Professor of Law, Florida Coastal School of Law. J.D., Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. A.B., Dartmouth College. I thank Ron Angerer (FCSL Class of 2013) for his outstanding research assistance. I thank Martin Witt, FCSL Research Librarian, for helping me track down old articles. I thank M.G. Piety for reviewing the draft, and I thank the Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law editors for their excellent work. I thank Dean C. Peter Goplerud for the research grant that helped me finish this article. I thank Boston University School of Law, where much of the research for this article was done when I was a Visiting Associate Professor of Law there from 2008-10. 1 Foley: Contraband Immunity: Updating Amsterdam, LaFave, and White's Use Published by Berkeley Law Scholarship Repository, 2012