Humanities desk
< November 7	<< Oct \| November \| Dec >>	November 9 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

November 8

Verify that three states ban "consent searches"

Hello, I'm trying to verify the following:

New Jersey Supreme Court in 2002 banned consent searches
Minnesota Supreme Court also banned consent searches in 2003
Rhode Island banned consent searches in 2004 when re-enacting it's data collection law

My original source was: https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/asset_upload_file125_28283.doc

I'm a bit confused now, because there was some type of reversal in 2015 in NJ dealing with "warrantless searches."

If you can point me in the right direction to get a definitive, up to date, reference, that would be great!

Is for: Consent search (see Talk page)

Thanks! Seahawk01 (talk) 02:56, 8 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your attempt to improve the article. According to the ACLU document you linked to, the New Jersey case was State v. Carty (in 2002, as you mention). Googling "state v carty new jersey" will bring up plenty of results, but an article analyzing the case can be found here. Note that the court heard that police may still request to perform a consent search in a case of "reasonable and articulable suspicion" that a crime has been committed. There is no need to find probable cause.

A 2016 New Jersey Supreme Court decision looking at New Jersey consent searches (including applying the aforementioned Carty test) would be State v. Hagans.

A somewhat dated, but still relevant analysis of consent searches in New Jersey can be found here Eliyohub (talk) 16:59, 8 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Eliyohub: perfect, thanks for the help! I put your comments here: Talk:Consent search. Quick note, you should ping the user when answering, cause I almost forgot to check back for the answer! Glad I did :-) Seahawk01 (talk) 02:36, 13 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

1840s Mexican Population question.

(For an alternate history with a different border after the Mexican-American war) I'm looking for information on the population of Mexico in the 1840s. Specifically, excluding the Republic of Texas, what percentage of the population of Mexico was in lands transferred to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and what percentage of the population of Mexico was in the lands north of the current southern tip of Texas. I know that this second splits Nuevo Leon, but since Monterrey is south of that line, I would expect that not much of Nuevo Leon (or much of Tamaulipas) would be included. I'm also assuming that all of Baja would be grabbed by US if this line was set.Naraht (talk) 20:38, 8 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Just considering the first part: The population of Mexico in 1865 was 8.2 million, and in 1803 it was 6.8 million. The populations of California and New Mexico in 1840 was roughly 180k. So based on this, one can reasonably assume that, in 1840, the non-Texian population transfer was no larger than 2%. --Golbez (talk) 20:58, 8 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

As I replied to a different question a few weeks ago, "there were only three main areas of compactly-settled significant Spanish-speaking populations in the whole area of Texas and the Mexican Cession: San Antonio and its surroundings, the lower Rio Grande valley, and northern New Mexico. (Other areas tended to be rather low-density, despite the inhabitants often leading what are now considered to be picturesque ranching or ex-mission lifestyles: 'By 1846, Alta California had a Spanish-speaking population of under 10,000'.)"

One prominent population a little South of the 1848 border was the Yaqui indians of the Sonoran desert, who maintained a kind of semi-autonomous status until such was later curtailed by the central Mexican government's brutal suppression of a number of revolts... AnonMoos (talk) 02:20, 9 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with these studies is that they ignore native populations. Mexico, in its censuses (for whatever they were) were largely concerned with their own subjects, and thus treated non-Mexicans (read: native people) as non-persons and ignored them. The fact that the counts quoted above specify "Spanish-speaking population" belies the fact that there were many more people living in these lands that were ignored as not-worth-counting. There were many times the number of native peoples, such as the Paiute, Ute, Mono, and many many dozens of other people groups. Consider the Yokut people: Estimates indicate that this one group had 18,000 people living in a small part of Alta California in 1770. Just from those numbers, it's clear the number of actual humans living in those lands was many many times larger than the "10,000 Spanish-speakers" noted above. I have no basis for guessing at an actual number, but I would not be shocked if the number of people living on the lands delineated above numbered in the 6-digit range easily. Just because those people were ignored by Mexico and the U.S. doesn't make them not have existed. --Jayron 32 03:05, 9 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Certainly, but the non-Spanish-speaking Indians probably mostly had little loyalty to Mexico, and could not really be called "Mexicans" in any meaningful sense (with some individual exceptions, of course), so they're not so directly relevant to the issue of United States vs. Mexican control of the area... AnonMoos (talk) 09:04, 9 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'd counter that, however. Some government is going to have to contend with them and/or their descendants. They exist and at some point the government in question is going to have to provide them with services like roads and schools and police and the like. They exist and need to be accounted for for all the same reasons that governments account for everyone else in a census. More to the point; just because they made the mistake of considering those people non-persons, doesn't mean we are forced to make the same mistake. Doing so has consequences. --Jayron 32 13:53, 9 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I wish you wouldn't throw around rhetoric loosely. They were not counted because they were not part of the political community for most purposes, which is different from saying that they were "non-persons". Probably in some circumstances some individuals did regard them as effectively "non-persons", but this does NOT follow directly or simply from their not being counted in a census. And in most cases the Mexican government wasn't going to build roads or schools for them -- in fact, it broke up the missions, which disrupted what little schooling had been going on under Spain. AnonMoos (talk) 16:00, 9 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]