The Fourth Amendment: from property to people
For the Fourth Amendment – the prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure – one of these foundational cases was Entick v. Carrington (1765). It was not until Katz in 1965 that the Supreme Court returned to the tradition of ex Parte Jackson and held that “the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.”
Working around the rules to give you movies on demand
David Pogue writes about a new startup that’s trying to work around the limitations media companies have placed on movie providers like Netflix and Redbox.
What was the "right to privacy" in 1948?
It took nearly 50 years for Justice Brandeis’ ground-breaking law review article on the right to privacy to begin to widely influence judicial decisions. By 1948, though, a dozen or so states had begun to recognize the right as a part of common law.
Constitutionalizing the sanctity of the mails
Anuj C. Desai explains that the extension of the Fourth Amendment to cover postal mail, and then later to telephones, is based not so much on the inherently Constitutional nature of opening mail, but instead on the increasingly firm belief in the sanctity of the mail as expressed by Congress, legislators, and the public.
New technologies lead to new constitutional protections
The boom in transportation and communications technologies in the nineteenth century outpaced the pace of legal change. It was only through the emergence of new concerns around both privacy and confidentiality that people themselves began to realize their importance in a way never before imagined.
Law of privacy vs. confidentiality in the nineteenth century
According to Richards and Solove the “right to privacy” as we now understand it actually grew out of an earlier recognition of the right to confidentiality in certain situations. Warren and Brandeis then took this original principle of confidentiality and shifted it to focus on a newly developed right to privacy.
The telegraph and business invasions of privacy
In the late 19th century, many began to see the rise of monopolistic telegraph operators as more of a threat than the government. Against this potential eavesdropper, the Bill of Rights provided no protection.
Extending the Fourth Amendment beyond the home: Ex parte Jackson (1878)
Ex parte Jackson, which dealt with government agents opening mail in search of banned lottery materials, hints at the future Court’s ruling on wiretaps in Katz v. United States that the Fourth Amendment “protects people, not places.”
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