Flock and the Fourth Amendment
When does a license plate become a tracking device?
Course Pricing
Course Summary
Automated license plate readers now sit on ordinary streets in most Oklahoma towns of any size, and most of them feed a network that shares what it sees. Any single scan is unremarkable — a photograph of a plate, in public, that an officer could have taken by hand. This course is about what happens when there are tens of millions of them: timestamped, geotagged, machine-indexed, and searchable backward through months of a person's movements. That is the aggregation problem, and it is why United States v. Jones, Carpenter v. United States, and the Supreme Court's June 2026 decision in Chatrie v. United States bear on Flock cameras far more directly than the license-plate cases do.
This is a hot-topic course for practicing lawyers, not a criminal procedure seminar. We work the doctrine honestly — the third-party doctrine's shrinking footprint after Carpenter and Chatrie, the features that made cell-site location data different, and how well a plate-reader network actually fits them — and we do it with the adverse authority in front of us. The cases holding that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a license plate are real and numerous, and you will hear the strongest version of that argument before you hear the answer to it.
A dedicated Oklahoma segment covers the wrinkle most practitioners have not seen. The only ALPR program our Legislature ever authorized, 47 O.S. § 7-606.1, was built for uninsured-vehicle enforcement and collapsed in 2020. In December 2024, ODOT asked cities to pull cameras out of state highway rights-of-way on the stated ground that any use beyond insurance verification is not statutorily authorized.
Mark Houts
Mark B. Houts has been litigating in Oklahoma since 2006. He began his career in insurance defense. In recent years, he has handled many civil-litigation matters including personal injury, property damage, title disputes, contract disputes, and business disputes. Houts litigates hard and will push cases to a jury verdict. In 2017, Mark opened Houts Law, PLLC, which has been thriving ever since. Houts Law has recovered millions for its clients. In 2025, Houts started OkieCLE.com to deliver high-quality, Oklahoma-specific content to Oklahoma lawyers. The platform has grown steadfastly since its inception.
Many years, Super Lawyers has named Mark as a "Rising Star" or "Super Lawyer". He has published multiple articles in the Oklahoma Bar Journal and an article in the Oklahoma City University Law Review.
