Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland is unlikely to be confirmed by the Senate anytime soon, and as his nomination twists windlessly before the Republican-led chamber some drug policy reform advocates and criminal defense attorneys are breathing a quiet sigh of relief.

In intentionally picking a middle-of-the-road jurist, they say, Obama threatened to replace one of the court’s notable advocates for the rights of defendants and criminal suspects – the late Antonin Scalia – with someone whose publicly discussed decisions give little indication of similar inclinations.

Though almost anyone with a public profile calls Garland well-qualified and his decisions well-written, one ruling increasingly is attracting attention: His first opinion as an appeals judge in 1997, in which he and two colleagues upheld the warrantless search of a car trunk in the nation’s capital.

Two years prior, a U.S. Park Police officer stopped a car without a front license plate and said he smelled pot smoke before seeing torn cigar papers and a bag containing a green substance through the car's windows. A warrantless trunk search then revealed 62 grams of crack cocaine and $825 in cash.

Garland found in the case, U.S. v. Turner, that the officer was allowed to search the trunk without a warrant, beating back arguments that a suspect's personal drug use does not establish probable cause to believe a car's trunk also contains contraband.

The ruling’s significance depends on whom you ask. Attorneys who support the reform of drug laws or advocate for defendants see it as wrongly allowing intrusions by law enforcement, but a trio of prominent legal scholars tell U.S. News it’s a finding well within the legal mainstream.

The 1997 decision received attention with an article in the National Law Journal, followed by a submission to the publication this week from Geremy Kamens, the federal public defender for the Eastern District of Virginia, who wrote that better standards have been set by California's court system and in at least one ruling by the Denver-based 10th Circuit.

“Since the Turner decision, federal and state court opinions have followed Garland's reasoning and upheld trunk searches based solely on evidence of personal drug use found in the passenger compartment. But they are misguided,” Kamens wrote. “[I]t does not follow that a person who recently smoked marijuana in a car keeps a stash at hand in the trunk.”

At issue are the precise confines of the "automobile exception" from the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement, which the Supreme Court established with a ruling against alcohol bootleggers in 1925 in Carroll v. U.S. The high court and lower ones later addressed the scope of warrantless searches allowed, and in the 1982 decision U.S. v. Ross justices found the exception applies to containers in a car – including locked trunks – where there's probable cause to believe contraband may be found.

The matter of whether personal drug use establishes probable cause for police to search a trunk varies among courts and sometimes cases. The 10th Circuit, for example, found in 2000 a police officer could not search a trunk without a warrant after smelling what he believed was burnt methamphetamine and finding pipes in a pat-down, but a panel of the same court five years later found a woman who handed an officer policeman marijuana and a pot pipe from her car provided probable cause for a trunk search.

David Smith, the attorney who lost before Garland’s panel in U.S. v. Turner, was quoted by the National Law Journal offering flattering thoughts on the Supreme Court nominee’s decision, but tells U.S. News that upon further consideration he sides with Kamens.

“The case could well have been decided the other way,” Smith says. “Being a criminal defense attorney, I’m always in favor of a more capacious interpretation of the Fourth Amendment protections against illegal searches and seizures.”

Smith says he has no reason to doubt that Garland is a well-qualified candidate for the Supreme Court, but that he’s hopeful a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton would choose someone like 8th Circuit Judge Jane Kelly, a former federal public defender, rather than reappoint Garland if he’s blocked before the election.

“Justice Scalia was probably the justice who was most favorable to criminal defendants on the court, which is not typical for conservative Republicans … so it’s a pity to lose him,” Smith says. “It seems to me we should also have another justice who is also very protective of criminal defense rights, and I can tell you based on Garland’s reputation he is not going to be that justice.”

“Middle of the road justices,” he adds, “are not particularly good on criminal defense, so I’d like to see someone stand up against public opinion and public pressure, who will have an interest in the issues and the willingness to stand up to the prosecutors.”

Retired California Superior Court Judge Jim Gray, who served about 25 years on the bench before declaring himself an opponent of the so-called war on drugs, says more lenient court standards for warrantless searches open the door to abuse.

“From what I have seen, Judge Garland is a fine judicial officer who takes the Fourth Amendment and its protections much less seriously than Justice Scalia did,” he says. “This [decision in U.S. v. Turner] is just a continuation of the erosion of our civil liberties in a misguided attempt to enforce drug prohibition. It used to be that a policeman could never go inside the trunk of your car or a locked suitcase in your car without getting a warrant.”

Gray says it's concerning that police may mistakenly or fraudulently claim to smell marijuana and support the observation with equally baseless suspicions of corroborating evidence to conduct a search.

The former judge says he’s still bothered by a case from long ago in which an officer claimed to have seen a traffic infraction and then smelled marijuana before searching a car, highlighting the potential for police to exaggerate or invent reasons to support a warrantless search.

“I don't think it happened, and I still regret I did not grant the motion to suppress evidence,” he says. “I’m convinced upon hindsight that [the police] were lying to me.”

Brian Vicente, a leader of Colorado’s marijuana legalization movement and co-founder of the pioneering cannabis industry law firm Vicente Sederberg, says he also is concerned about the Garland ruling.

"Voters should be concerned about nominee Garland's spotted record on criminal justice matters,” he says. “He's used his position to bolster police powers to search vehicles based on the suspicion of the presence of marijuana. Now, with marijuana legal in 23 states for medical purposes and fully legal for adults in four states and the nation's capital, his views are increasingly out of touch with mainstream mores."

But prominent legal scholars say it’s not clear that Garland’s ruling suggests an abnormally narrow view of the Fourth Amendment.

“Although I would personally have preferred a different result in U.S. v. Turner, Judge Garland’s opinion deals carefully, honestly and correctly with federal court precedent on the subject,” Yale Law School professor Steven Duke says.

“He rightly points out that, while the smell of marijuana might not justify a trunk search, here there was more than a smell; there was actual marijuana in the passenger compartment,” Duke says. “ I do not think this opinion provides much cause for concern about Judge Garland’s respect for privacy.”

George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr says “there is some arguable tension in the different circuit court decisions about whether the automobile [warrant] exception requires specific probable cause as to the trunk, as opposed to probable cause to the car generally. If that's right, though, I'm not sure what it shows or why Garland's opinion has any significance.”

Kerr says he believes Garland's approach to the case was correct and "most consistent with the Supreme Court's decisions such as Ross."

"But either way, I don't see why Garland's opinion is significant or influential," he adds. “It's just one of dozens of opinions on the issue, and it doesn't stand out as particularly noteworthy."

University of Florida law professor John Stinneford also says Garland's views appear mainstream, and that analysis of the constitutionality of trunk searches rests largely with the deference given by judges to apparent corroborating evidence and law enforcement claims about the items.

“Judge Garland's view does appear more deferential to police judgment, but I suspect that if you read a lot of circuit court cases, you'll find some that are more deferential than others,” he says. “You might find the same thing if you read a bunch of Judge Garland opinions.”