Professor Burkoff argues that the Burger Court has in the recent past definitionally excluded some law enforcement activity which should clearly have been included within the Court's own guidelines and precedent for determination of what activity constitutes a fourth amendment 'search.' Such exclusion, he argues further, reflects a partly conscious, partly unconscious tendency on the part of a majority of the justices to favor short-term crime control objectives at the expense of consistent application of accepted fourth amendment doctrine. This sort of decisionmaking, Professor Burkoff concludes, is both unwise and unprincipled. Ultimately, the case law which is its product may serve to jeopardize the Supreme Court's necessary role as a check against Orwellian abuses of individual privacy by the State. (Author abstract)