A group of NYPD officers making an arrest (A Katz/Shutterstock.com).Originalism, the Fourth Amendment, and New Technology
Image: Ivan Smuk/Shutterstock.com.The Original Meaning and The Exclusionary Rule
The U.S. Supreme Court in March 2015 (Stock Photo World/Shutterstock.com).The Original Meaning and the Carpenter Case: Establishing Joint Ownership of Customer Records
The Original Meaning and the Carpenter Case: Congress’s Protection of Customer Information
In my last post, I discussed the Fourth Amendment, the third party doctrine, and the Carpenter case (which involved information secured from a cell phone company about a consumer’s cell phone location). In that post, I discussed the third party doctrine generally and applied it to Carpenter as an illustration. But Carpenter has an important feature, noted by other bloggers and commenters, that goes beyond the narrow question of the third party doctrine: Congress has passed a statutory provision that protects against the disclosure of information about cell phone customers.
The Original Meaning and the Carpenter Case: “Their Papers”
The Carpenter v. United States case, which was argued before the Supreme Court earlier this week, may turn out to be one of the most important Fourth Amendment cases.
The Legislative History of the Fourth Amendment: Unreasonable Searches and General Warrants
The Fourth Amendments has two main clauses: a rights clause and a prohibition on certain types of warrants clause (the prohibition clause):
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Significantly, the two clauses are separated by an “and.” This “and” has led to an uncertainty about the relationship between the two clauses.
The Original Meaning of the Fourth Amendment: What Does “the Place to Be Searched” Mean?
Lately, I have been exploring the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment, which I am finding to be a fascinating subject. The text of the Fourth Amendment is filled with significant interpretive questions.
Originalist Scholarship Relying on the Language of the Law–Part II
In our last post, we provided some examples of recent scholarship that rely on the view, which we have defended, that the Constitution is written in the language of law. They are not consistent with the view that the Constitution is written in ordinary language. In this post we provide some other important examples.
Scholars have even shown the language that looks most ordinary is better understood as part of the language of the law. The Fourth Amendment provides: “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” The word “unreasonable” is sometimes used as an example of a vague word in ordinary language that renders the meaning of a constitutional provision indeterminate. But Laura Donohue has argued that the word “unreasonable” should be instead read with the legal meaning of “against the reason of the common law.” As a result, the Fourth Amendment does not incorporate some free-floating reasonableness test, but a set of specific prohibitions of searches that violated the common law.
