No Unreasonable Searches And Seizures

Back in the late 1700s, some of the states only ratified the new U.S. Constitution with the provision that lawmakers add a Bill of Rights. In this book, readers will discover how the Third and Fourth Amendments earned inclusion in the Bill of Rights. Complicated political language is simplified, helping readers recognize the amendments at work in modern life. Both amendments reflect the fundamental American values of privacy and personal property. They protect homes, belongings, and even phone conversations. Primary sources, engaging images, and sidebars explore the evolving interpretation of the Third and Fourth Amendments. Student readers will close this book with a new understanding of how these amendments affect young people today.

This book is an introduction to the Fourth Amendment which empowers the people as it guarantees interdiction of unreasonable search and seizure.

This is a historical look at the Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, covering more than two centuries of search-and-seizure law. The book contains an A-Z listing of key individuals, historical events and court cases and excerpts from primary documents, court decisions and statutory provisions.

The modern law of search and seizure permits warrantless searches that ruin the citizenry's trust in law enforcement, harms minorities, and embraces an individualistic notion of the rights that it protects, ignoring essential roles that properly-conceived protections of privacy, mobility, and property play in uniting Americans. Many believe the Fourth Amendment is a poor bulwark against state tyrannies, particularly during the War on Terror. Historical amnesia has obscured the Fourth Amendment's positive aspects, and Andrew E. Taslitz rescues its forgotten history in Reconstructing the Fourth Amendment, which includes two novel arguments. First, that the original Fourth Amendment of 1791—born in political struggle between the English and the colonists—served important political functions, particularly in regulating expressive political violence. Second, that the Amendment’s meaning changed when the Fourteenth Amendment was created to give teeth to outlawing slavery, and its focus shifted from primary emphasis on individualistic privacy notions as central to a white democratic polis to enhanced protections for group privacy, individual mobility, and property in a multi-racial republic. With an understanding of the historical roots of the Fourth Amendment, suggests Taslitz, we can upend negative assumptions of modern search and seizure law, and create new institutional approaches that give political voice to citizens and safeguard against unnecessary humiliation and dehumanization at the hands of the police.