Atwater v. Lago Vista, 532 U.S. 318 (2001), was a United States Supreme Court decision which held that a person's Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the subject is arrested for driving without a seatbelt.

However, According to the record, Atwater remained calm and did not act suspiciously, did not pose any threat to Turek and did not engage in any illegal conduct other than failing to wear a seatbelt.

[3] Turek handcuffed Atwater in front of her children, placed her in his squad car, did not fasten her seatbelt[3] and drove her to the police station to be booked and fingerprinted.

§ 1983,[6] alleging that the city violated her Fourth Amendment right of freedom from unreasonable seizures by arresting her for an offense that was punishable with a simple monetary fine.

[9] Three judges dissented from the en banc panel's ruling, arguing that the police should have had a specific reason for arresting Atwater for only violating the seatbelt law.

[10] The court started by analyzing and rejecting Atwater's argument that the common law did not grant authority to police officers to execute warrantless arrests for misdemeanors that did not involve a breach of the peace.

[11] The court, recognizing the lack of unanimity of a common-law rule,[12] found that the historical common law had a "decided, majority view that the police did not need to obtain an arrest warrant merely because a misdemeanor stopped short of violence or threat of it," and hence the argument had failed.

In Wilson v. Arkansas, 514 U.S. 927 (1995), the court had considered whether the Fourth Amendment required the police to knock first and announce their presence before entering a person's home.

Atwater claimed that the framers of the Fourth Amendment understood an "unreasonable" seizure to include a warrantless arrest for a misdemeanor offense that was not a "breach of the peace."

After asking in oral argument, "how bad the problem is out there?," the court admonished Atwater's counsel's failure to provide it with "indications of comparably foolish, warrantless misdemeanor arrests."

"[15] Justice O'Connor, presenting the dissenting opinion, stated that the historical evidence was not uniform in rejecting Atwater's proposed rule and reasoned that the Fourth Amendment required a balancing of interests in the case of an arrest for a fine-only misdemeanor.

But, because of the short duration of the typical traffic stop and the fact that most drivers are free to leave after it is concluded, such a seizure was commensurate with the magnitude of the violation and sufficient to ensure that the offender would appear later in court if necessary.

The dissent argued that "probable cause" and "extraordinary" circumstances were defined without problem in cases such as Terry v. Ohio and Whren v. United States and that Atwater could not have been characterized as a possible flight risk by the arresting officer as she was known to him and was an established member of the community.

The dissenting justices further noted that an arrest for a fine-only misdemeanor is unreasonable because incarcerating an offender for as long as 48 hours (the maximum duration for a magistrate to release the person) is too great an intrusion upon the liberty of one who has committed a relatively minor offense that would merit only a fine as its punishment.