Fourth Amendment Quotes

Early in the campaign, in a Producers-worthy scene, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate: “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.

When they took the Fourth Amendment, I was silent because I don't deal drugs. When they took the Sixth Amendment, I kept quiet because I know I'm innocent. When they took the Second Amendment, I said nothing because I don't own a gun. Now they've come for the First Amendment, and I can't say anything at all.

The Fourth Amendment wasn't written for people with nothing to hide any more than the First Amendment was written for people with nothing to say.

If you can see a cop in your rear view mirror - no matter how far back the cop is - TURN! The sooner you turn the better. Your goal while driving should be to never let a law enforcement officer into a position where he can pull you over. Don't even let them come close enough to read your tag.

The Patriot Act has practically obliterated the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. It was supposed to be temporary, but there are so many things that the Government likes about the power that it gives, they keep renewing it.

Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.

Above even our physical well-being, a central value is keeping the state out of the private realm—our “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” as the Fourth Amendment puts it. We do so precisely because that realm is the crucible of so many of the attributes typically associated with the quality of life—creativity, exploration, intimacy.

If you can see a cop in your rear view mirror - no matter how far back the cop is - TURN!" according to Attorney Rex Curry, "The sooner you turn the better. Your goal while driving should be to never let a law enforcement officer into a position where he can pull you over. Don't even let them come close enough to read your tag.

Thanks to Edward Snowden and others, the great threat from the NSA surveillance is now more clearly understood. Current attacks on our liberties very greatly infringe the freedoms meant to be protected by the First and Fourth Amendments. If a whistle-blower reveals the truth about wrongful government actions, calls arise to charge him with treason for hating America. Allies become enemies when it becomes known that we spy on them as well, as it has now been revealed.

[T]here is both an intrinsic and instrumental value to privacy. Intrinsically, privacy is precious to the extent that it is a component of a liberty. Part of citizenship in a free society is the expectation that one's personal affairs and physical person are inviolable so long as one remains within the law. A robust concept of freedom includes the freedom from constant and intrusive government surveillance of one's life. From this perspective, Fourth Amendment violations are objectionable for the simple fact that the government is doing something it has no licence to do–that is, invading the privacy of a law-abiding citizen by monitoring her daily activities and laying hands on her person without any evidence of wrongdoing. Privacy is also instrumental in nature. This aspect of the right highlights the pernicious effects, rather than the inherent illegitimacy, of intrusive, suspicionless surveillance. For example, encroachments on individual privacy undermine democratic institutions by chilling free speech. When citizens–especially those espousing unpopular viewpoints–are aware that the intimate details of their personal lives are pervasively monitored by government, or even that they could be singled out for discriminatory treatment by government officials as a result of their First Amendment expressive activities, they are less likely to freely express their dissident views.

The NSA’s surveillance programs, its domestic surveillance programs in particular, flouted the Fourth Amendment completely.

The protection guaranteed by the Amendments is much broader in scope. The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And the use, as evidence in a criminal proceeding, of facts ascertained by such intrusion must be deemed a violation of the Fifth. [Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928) (dissenting)]

The law was written at a time when folks were not that interested in the Fourth Amendment. Or the Fifth Amendment, for that matter, Or, actually, the Sixth." He chortled lightly to himself. "Or the eighth.

According to the Court, whether or not police discriminate on the basis of race when making traffic stops is irrelevant to a consideration of whether their conduct is “reasonable” under the Fourth Amendment.

In so doing, the Court made clear to all lower courts that, from now on, the Fourth Amendment should place no meaningful constraints on the police in the War on Drugs. No one needs to be informed of their rights during a stop or search, and police may use minor traffic stops as well as the myth of “consent” to stop and search anyone they choose for imaginary drug crimes, whether or not any evidence of illegal drug activity actually exists.

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, intact for over 200 years, guaranteed that 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 of affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. After September 11th, 2001, those were just words on an old piece of paper, no longer a restriction of the Government’s overreaching power to shake down its subjects.

Fourth Amendment, which requires a judge-issued warrant for an arrest; the Fifth Amendment, which requires a grand jury indictment before a person is held for trial; and the Sixth Amendment, which says that a person can be imprisoned only after conviction by a jury based on proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

With only a few exceptions, the Supreme Court has seized every opportunity to facilitate the drug war, primarily by eviscerating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the police. The rollback has been so pronounced that some commentators charge that a virtual “drug exception” now exists to the Bill of Rights.

The answer was Stellar Wind. The NSA would eavesdrop freely against Americans and aliens in the United States without probable cause or search warrants. It would mine and assay the electronic records of millions of telephone conversations—both callers and receivers—and the subject lines of e-mails, including names and Internet addresses. Then it would send the refined intelligence to the Bureau for action. Stellar Wind resurrected Cold War tactics with twenty-first-century technology. It let the FBI work with the NSA outside of the limits of the law. As Cheney knew from his days at the White House in the wake of Watergate, the NSA and the FBI had worked that way up until 1972, when the Supreme Court unanimously outlawed warrantless wiretaps. Stellar Wind blew past the Supreme Court on the authority of a dubious opinion sent to the White House the week that the Patriot Act became law. It came from John Yoo, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who had clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. Yoo wrote that the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches and seizures did not apply to military operations in the United States. The NSA was a military agency; Congress had authorized Bush to use military force; therefore he had the power to use the NSA against anyone anywhere in America. The president was “free from the constraints of the Fourth Amendment,” Yoo wrote. So the FBI would be free as well.

Jacobson had been told to remove the Fourth Amendment protections from an experimental surveillance system, one of the most powerful spying programs the NSA had ever developed. The advanced system was still just a pilot project, but top NSA officials wanted to make it operational immediately—and use it to collect data on Americans. They had ordered Jacobson to strip away the carefully calibrated restrictions built into the system, which were designed to prevent it from illegally collecting information on U.S. citizens.

With only a few exceptions, the Supreme Court has seized every opportunity to facilitate the drug war, primarily by eviscerating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the police. The rollback has been so pronounced that some commentators charge that a virtual 'drug exception' now exists to the Bill of Rights. Shortly before his death, Justice Thurgood Marshall felt compelled to remind his colleagues that there is, in fact, 'no drug exception' written into the text of the Constitution.

This investigation has revealed a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson Police Department that violates the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and federal statutory law.

convened) against domestic Violence. ARTICLE V The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of it's equal Suffrage in the Senate. ARTICLE VI All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation. This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. ARTICLE VII The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same. Done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth. In Witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names, Go. WASHINGTON— Presid. and deputy from Virginia New Hampshire John Langdon Nicholas Gilman Massachusetts Nathaniel Gorham Rufus King Connecticut Wm. Saml. Johnson Roger Sherman New York Alexander Hamilton New Jersey Wil: Livingston David Brearley Wm. Paterson Jona: Dayton Pennsylvania B Franklin Thomas Mifflin Robt Morris Geo. Clymer Thos FitzSimons Jared Ingersoll James Wilson Gouv Morris Delaware Geo: Read Gunning Bedford jun John Dickinson Richard Bassett Jaco: Broom Maryland James Mchenry

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a complaint against Colorado City and Hildale in June 2012, alleging that by acquiescing to the influence of the FLDS Church in the areas of law enforcement, housing, and access to public facilities, and discriminating against non-FLDS residents, the two areas and agencies under their control violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, as well as the Fair Housing Act and Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.75 The lawsuit is currently pending.

If you’re a person of means, you get full service for all ten amendments, and even a few that aren’t listed. But if you owe, if you rent, you get a slightly thinner, more tubercular version of the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and so on.

pedophiles. Dillinger, he says, is an agent of Pedofind. He’s given them information in the past, they’ve turned it over to government authorities, and the information has resulted in criminal prosecutions. Because both are acting on behalf of the government, the search of Carver’s computer is covered by the Fourth Amendment. A warrant is required. Since there was no warrant, the search is illegal. The evidence must be suppressed. When Kay is finished, I experience the same feeling of gloom that I experienced so many

Just a few months into my tenure in the Senate, the Senate Judiciary Committee convened a hearing on Feinstein’s renewed assault weapons ban, which included a hundred-page list of prohibited and permitted firearms. Sitting on the far side of the panel as the committee’s second most junior Republican, I noted that the operative language of the Second Amendment—“the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”—is the same as the operative language in the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment, which protect “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” and “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” I then asked a simple question of Senator Feinstein: Would she deem it consistent with the Bill of Rights for Congress to engage in the same endeavor that we are contemplating doing with the Second Amendment in the context of the First or Fourth Amendment? Namely, would she consider it constitutional for Congress to specify that the First Amendment shall apply only to the following books and shall not apply to the books that Congress has deemed outside the protection of the Bill of Rights? Likewise, would she think that the Fourth Amendment’s protection against searches and seizures could properly apply only to the following specified individuals and not to the individuals that Congress has deemed outside the protection of the Bill of Rights?

The alienation of Americans from the democratic process has also eroded knowledge of the most basic facts about our constitutional architecture of checks and balances. When the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania conducted a broad survey on our Constitution, released in September 2006, they found that more than a third of the respondents believed the executive branch has the final say on all issues and can overrule the legislative and judicial branches. Barely half—53 percent—believed that the president was required to follow a Supreme Court decision with which he disagreed. Similarly, only 55 percent of those questioned believed that the Supreme Court had the power to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. Another study found that the majority of respondents did not know that Congress—rather than the president—has the power to declare war. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute conducted a study in 2005 of what our nation’s college students knew about the Constitution, American government, and American history that provoked the American Political Science Association Task Force on Civic Education to pronounce that it is “axiomatic that current levels of political knowledge, political engagement, and political enthusiasm are so low as to threaten the vitality and stability of democratic politics in the United States.” The study found that less than half of college students “recognized that the line ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ is from the Declaration of Independence.” They also found that “an overwhelming majority, 72.8 percent, could not correctly identify the source of the idea of ‘a wall of separation’ between church and state.” When the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation conducted a survey of high school students to determine their feelings toward the First Amendment, they found that “after the text of the First Amendment was read to students, more than a third of them (35 percent) thought that the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees. Nearly a quarter (21 percent) did not know enough about the First Amendment to even give an opinion. Of those who did express an opinion, an even higher percentage (44 percent) agreed that the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees.” The survey revealed that “nearly three-fourths” of high school students “either don’t know how they feel about [the First Amendment] or they take it for granted.

The new GST: A halfway house In spite of all the favourable features of the GST, it introduces the anomaly of having an origin-based tax on interstate trade he proposed GST would be a single levy. 1141 words From a roadblock during the UPA regime, the incessant efforts of the BJP government have finally paved way for the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST). This would, no doubt, be a major reform in the existing indirect tax system of the country. With a view to introducing the GST, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley has introduced the Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill 2014 in Parliament. The new tax would be implemented from April 1, 2016. Both the government and the taxpayers will have enough time to understand the implications of the new tax and its administrative nuances. Unlike the 119th Amendment Bill, which lapsed with the dissolution of the previous Lok Sabha, the new Bill will hopefully see the light of the day as it takes into account the objections of the state governments regarding buoyancy of the tax and the autonomy of the states. It proposes setting up of the GST Council, which will be a joint forum of the Centre and the states. This council would function under the chairmanship of the Union finance minister with all the state finance ministers as its members. It will make recommendations to the Union and the states on the taxes, cesses and surcharges levied by the Union, the states and the local bodies, which may be subsumed in the GST; the rates including floor rates with bands of goods and services tax; any special rate or rates for a specified period to raise additional resources during any natural calamity or disaster etc. However, all the recommendations will have to be supported by not less than three-fourth of the weighted votes—the Centre having one-third votes and the states having two-third votes. Thus, no change can be implemented without the consent of both the Centre and the states. The proposed GST would be a single levy. It would aim at creating an integrated national market for goods and services by replacing the plethora of indirect taxes levied by the Centre and the states. While central taxes to be subsumed include central excise duty (CenVAT), additional excise duties, service tax, additional customs duty (CVD) and special additional duty of customs (SAD), the state taxes that fall in this category include VAT/sales tax, entertainment tax, octroi, entry tax, purchase tax and luxury tax. Therefore, all taxes on goods and services, except alcoholic liquor for human consumption, will be brought under the purview of the GST. Irrespective of whether we currently levy GST on these items or not, it is important to bring these items under the Constitution Amendment Bill because the exclusion of these items from the GST does not provide any flexibility to levy GST on these items in the future. Any change in the future would then require another Constitutional Amendment. From a futuristic approach, it is prudent not to confine the scope of the tax under the bindings of the Constitution. The Constitution should demarcate the broad areas of taxing powers as has been the case with sales tax and Union excise duty in the past. Currently, the rationale of exclusion of these commodities from the purview of the GST is solely based on revenue considerations. No other considerations of tax policy or tax administration have gone into excluding petroleum products from the purview of the GST. However, the long-term perspective of a rational tax policy for the GST shows that, at present, these taxes constitute more than half of the retail prices of motor fuel. In a scenario where motor fuel prices are deregulated, the taxation policy would have to be flexible and linked to the global crude oil prices to ensure that prices are held stable and less pressure exerted on the economy during the increasing price trends. The trend of taxation of motor fuel all over the world suggests that these items

Border security” means running random checkpoints anywhere within one hundred miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, a Constitution-free zone in which agents can stop your car, inspect your belongings, and ask for your papers, regardless of your immigration status. (The Fourth Amendment does not allow for citizens to be subjected to random search and seizures, but in the interest of “national security,” the Fourth Amendment does not apply within a hundred miles of the border.)

cause. Justice Douglas dissented in Terry on the grounds that “grant[ing] police greater power than a magistrate [judge] is to take a long step down the totalitarian path.”11 He objected to the notion that police should be free to conduct warrantless searches whenever they suspect someone of criminal activity, believing that dispensing with the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement risked opening the door to the

In Atwater v. Lago Vista in 2001, the Court held that police did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they arrested a mother, and took her to the stationhouse for booking, for not having her children in seat belts

the Court has reaffirmed that the officers’ subjective motivation is irrelevant in evaluating whether a stop or an arrest is lawful under the Fourth Amendment. As long as the officer can articulate reasonable suspicion for making a stop, even if it had nothing to do with the real reason for the stop, he or she has not violated the Fourth Amendment.

The Court held that the exclusionary rule may be applied only if police intentionally or recklessly violate the Fourth Amendment or only if police department violations with regard to searches and seizures are systemic.

Instead, the Court’s conservative majority that already wanted to limit the exclusionary rule issued a sweeping decision that evidence never has to be excluded if the police violate the Fourth Amendment in good faith or through negligence.

the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party . . ., even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed.”55

Miller says that when police obtain information that a person has shared with a third party, it is not a search. Therefore, the requirements for probable cause and a warrant—the key protections of privacy under the Fourth Amendment—do not apply or need to be met.

Chambers, the Supreme Court invoked the automobile exception to the Fourth Amendment and said “automobiles and other conveyances may be searched without a warrant in circumstances that would not justify the search without a warrant of a house or an office” if officers have probable cause to believe that the car contains articles that they are entitled to seize.

That the search violated the Fourth Amendment was undisputed—it had been done without probable cause. But the Supreme Court ruled that the evidence was nonetheless admissible at trial.

John Hancock averred in his oration on the fourth anniversary of the Boston Massacre: "From a well regulated militia we have nothing to fear . . . . They fight for their houses, their lands, for their wives, their children, for all who claim the tenderest names, and are held dearest in their hearts, they fight pro aris & focis, for their liberty, and for themselves, and for their God." Hancock added that "no militia ever appear'd in more flourishing condition, than that of this province now doth

The Court recognized in Whren, as it had to, that “[t]emporary detention of individuals during the stop of an automobile by the police, even if only for a brief period and for a limited purpose, constitutes a ‘seizure’ of ‘persons’” under the Fourth Amendment.16 The Constitution clearly requires, the Court said, that an automobile stop must be reasonable under the circumstances. What makes it reasonable? “[T]he decision to stop an automobile is reasonable where the police have probable cause to believe that a traffic violation has occurred.

when police violate the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for “knock and announce,” the exclusionary rule does not apply.

In California v. Hodari D. in 1991, the Court held that a person who is being chased by the police is not considered to be seized until he or she is actually tackled by the officer; chasing the individual does not constitute a seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.63 But fifteen states have rejected this idea and said that under their state constitutions, chasing a suspect is sufficient to constitute a seizure and thus requires at least reasonable suspicion.64

The Court did not deny that the chokehold constitutes excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, but it effectively said that no court can issue an injunction to stop the practice.

Schneckloth v. Bustamonte is important on many levels. First, it dramatically empowers police to be able to search. It obviates the need for police to meet all the requirements of the Fourth Amendment, such as the need for probable cause (or at least reasonable suspicion) and the need for a warrant. It is estimated that consent searches comprise over 90 percent of all warrantless searches.

Stone v. Powell in 1976, the Court concluded that Fourth Amendment claims that had been raised and decided in state courts could not be heard in federal habeas corpus review.

The Fourth Amendment protects people, not property, the Court stressed. A person’s Fourth Amendment rights do not depend on where he or she is at the time of the government intrusion, nor on whether a physical trespass occurs.

Fourth Amendment protection against a search has a “twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable.’”11

There followed some recommended changes to the structure of the government and then three individual rights: 10th. That no standing army shall be kept up in time of peace, unless with the consent of three fourths of the members of each branch of Congress; nor shall soldiers in a time of peace, be quartered upon private houses without the consent of the owners. 11th. Congress shall make no laws touching religion or to infringe the rights of conscience. 12th. Congress shall never disarm any citizen, unless such as are or have been in actual rebellion.111 Freedom of religion and conscience, possession of arms, and no non-consensual peacetime quartering of soldiers in private houses would be reflected in the First, Second, and Third Amendments. The prohibitions on Congress would be absolute—"Congress shall make no laws" touching religion or conscience and "shall never disarm any citizen.

What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection.

factual findings and legal conclusions and denied Rodriguez’s

And once law enforcement officers have secured a cell phone, there is no longer any risk that the arrestee himself will be able to delete incriminating data from the phone.

The Global Plan’s most impressive feature was its incredible adaptability – successive US administrations amended it every time bits of it came unstuck. Their policies toward Japan are an excellent example: after Mao’s unexpected victory, and the demise of the original plan to turn the Chinese mainland into a huge market for Japanese industrial output, US policy makers responded with a variety of inspired responses. First, they utilized the Korean War, turning it into an excellent opportunity to inject demand into the Japanese industrial sector. Secondly, they used their influence over America’s allies to allow Japanese imports freely into their markets. Thirdly, and most surprisingly, Washington decided to turn America’s own market into Japan’s vital space. Indeed, the penetration of Japanese imports (cars, electronic goods, even services) into the US market would have been impossible without a nod and a wink from Washington’s policy makers. Fourthly, the successor to the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, was also enlisted to boost Japanese industry further. A useful by-product of that murderous escapade was the industrialization of South East Asia, which further strengthened Japan by providing it, at long last, with the missing link – a commercial vital zone in close proximity.

The point of the Fourth Amendment which often is not grasped by zealous officers is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime.

But for six, seven and eight, I’ve always felt it extremely helpful to study the Twelve and Twelve. Right off the bat, we find out about forgiveness. This becomes the lead way of approaching this particular chore, the slides where we harm people. Without forgiveness, we look at these and conclude that it’s partially their fault. I know I acted terribly, but they made me do it! If they didn’t do that, I never would have dumped all the beer all over their living room! We’re transferring responsibility for our own actions to other people, which was our specialty before we got to AA. Bill suggests that as we take the fourth step, we also look more closely at harm and forgiveness. We go back as far as we can think, to when we were children, because not only do we want to go make the amends, we want to change the slide so that we don’t do it anymore. That allows us to have an entirely different view up there in the future. Forgiveness is almost like a magic spot remover; just the act itself starts letting light through these various incidences, because it takes a lot of the anger that we have over the event and reduces it.

Courts and scholars agree that the Fourth Amendment governs all searches and seizures by the police

Freedom of speech and association; due process; habeas corpus; the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement; even the prohibitions on torture and extrajudicial killings—the law governing these constitutional principles looks vastly different in 2015 than it did in the summer of 2001.

two components of the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the enabling of blanket authorizations for electronic surveillance and the elimination of the FISA judge’s authority to scrutinize the factual basis for a warrant application—permitted a pattern of conduct that violated the Fourth Amendment rights of millions of people.

These days, each of the federal branches has seized expanded authority over the states and the individual. In addition to Congress’s legislative authority, it is now commonplace for the courts to legislate by judicial review and the executive branch to legislate by regulation and executive order. More to the justification of the proposed amendment, the vastness of the federal bureaucracy—that is, an administrative state or what has become a fourth branch of government—destroys the very idea of a representative legislature and does severe damage to the separation-of-powers doctrine.

For, read properly, the ninth amendment creates no rights at all. There are no “ninth amendment rights” in the sense in which there are, for example, first amendment rights or fourth amendment rights. That there are individual rights fully derivable from no single provision but implicit in several, or in the structure of the Bill of Rights as a whole, is a proposition implicit in the ninth amendment. But that amendment is not itself the fount of any such rights, and it in no way obviates the need to argue that the Constitution does indeed impose upon government the particular limitation for which the advocate contends.52 Thus the Ninth Amendment itself does not protect a right, but tells us not to not find a right in the Constitution just because it is not specifically enumerated. The right to privacy still needs some kind of constitutional hook, although that hook might be the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, even though the clause does not mention “privacy.” In interpreting that clause, and other clauses, we should be mindful of their more expansive interpretations.

The fourth model, the collective rights model, believes the amendment is a rule of construction that does protect rights, but collective rights of people in the states. A foremost example of such a collective right, put forward by Professor Akhil Amar, is the right of the people to alter or abolish their government.48 Another is the right of a state’s body politic to choose the policies it wants to adopt free from federal government interference.

That reprehensible ‘law’ is a flagrant violation of the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures guaranteed to all citizens by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and a stain on the conscience of every God-fearing man and woman,” I shot back.

Under Article V of the Constitution, an amendment requires a two-thirds majority vote by both the Senate and the House of Representatives and then must be approved by a majority vote of three-fourths of the states. The procedural requirements are daunting. There is in principle an alternative path for considering amendments to the Constitution—a new constitutional convention, convened by a majority vote by two-thirds (thirty-four of fifty) of state legislatures—but this too is a high bar and has yet to happen in practice.

The problem is from listening to the tapes and examining other incriminating evidence, the Fulton County Police Department’s indictment and your arrest was illegal according to the Fourth Amendment. Our records and their records clearly indicate the first evidence submitted was a taped conversation where you ordered Cole Henderson’s murder.

Fourth Amendment reasonableness balances the advancement of government interests against the intrusion of the government’s acts. An officer should only be permitted to invoke a legal standard based on a different government’s interests when that government has recognized that enforcement as genuine and legitimate. Permitting cross-enforcement without authorization would permit an officer to piggyback on government interests that his searches and seizures are unlikely to advance. Authorization provides the best signal that an officer’s conduct genuinely advances the government interests used that justify it. When a government is silent on who can enforce its laws, questions of constitutional history and structure justify different presumptions. State officers should be allowed to search or seize to enforce federal criminal laws unless Congress has forbidden it. On the other hand, federal officers should not be allowed to search or seize to enforce state law unless state statutory or caselaw affirmatively allows it.

The Fourth Amendment is one of the most important parts of this entire democracy because the government may not search and seize the people’s papers and effects without a warrant. But now we’re drifting to a place that, even with a warrant, there will be papers and effects, even with court authority, that are beyond the reach of the law. Maybe we want to go there. Maybe that’s where we want to end up as a democracy. Maybe people decide that privacy is that important. But I don’t think we’re talking about it enough. I don’t think we’re thinking about, “So what are the trade-offs involved there?

Someone nudged her elbow, interrupting her reverie. “Hello? Anyone there?” The question came from Rylann’s roommate, Rae Mendoza, who was seated at her right. “I’m here. Just…picturing myself at the pool.” Rylann tried to hold on to the mirage for a few moments longer. “It’s sunny and seventy-five degrees. I’ve got some kind of tropical drink with one of those little umbrellas in it, and I’m reading a book—one I don’t have to highlight or outline in the margins.” “They make those kinds of books?” “If memory serves..." “I hate to burst the bubble on your daydream, but I’m pretty sure they don’t allow alcoholic drinks at IMPE,” Rae said, referring to the university’s Intramural Physical Education building, which housed said pool. Rylann waved off such pesky details. “I’ll throw a mai tai in my College of Law thermos and tell people that it’s iced tea. If campus security gives me any trouble, I’ll scare them off with my quasi-legal credentials and remind them of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against illegal searches and seizures.” “Wow. Do you know how big of a law school geek you just sounded like?” Unfortunately, she did. “Do you think any of us will ever be normal again?” Rae considered this. “I’m told that somewhere around third year, we lose the urge to cite the Constitution in everyday conversation.” “That’s promising,” Rylann said. “But seeing how you’re more of a law geek than most, it might take you longer.” “Remember that conversation last night when I said I was going to miss you this summer? I take it back

Right of the People." The first salient feature of the operative clause is that it codifies a "right of the people." The unamended Constitution and the Bill of Rights use the phrase "right of the people" two other times, in the First Amendment's Assembly-and-Petition Clause and in the Fourth Amendment's Search-and-Seizure Clause. The Ninth Amendment uses very similar terminology ("The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people"). All three of these instances unambiguously refer to individual rights, not "collective" rights, or rights that may be exercised only through participation in some corporate body.

We don’t have to punish ourselves by feeling guilty to prove to God or anyone else how much we care.7 We need to forgive ourselves. Take the Fourth and Fifth Steps (see the chapter on working a Twelve Step program); talk to a clergy person; talk to God; make amends; and then be done with it.

Similarly, the amendments covering the criminal justice system—the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth—have offered little to no protection for African Americans because of numerous Supreme Court decisions that have embedded racism and racial profiling into policing, trial procedures, and sentencing.

To give the police greater power than a magistrate is to take a long step down the totalitarian path. Perhaps such a step is desirable to cope with modern forms of lawlessness. But if it is taken, it should be the deliberate choice of the people through a constitutional amendment. Until the Fourth Amendment, which is closely allied with the Fifth, is rewritten, the person and the effects of the individual are beyond the reach of all government agencies until there are reasonable grounds to believe (probable cause) that a criminal venture has been launched or is about to be launched. There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater than it is today. Yet if the individual is no longer to be sovereign, if the police can pick him up whenever they do not like the cut of his jib, if they can 'seize' and 'search' him in their discretion, we enter a new regime. The decision to enter it should be made only after a full debate by the people of this country. [Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968) (dissenting)]

LA FAUTE DE L’ABBE MOURET’ was, with respect to the date of publication, the fourth volume of M. Zola’s ‘Rougon-Macquart’ series; but in the amended and final scheme of that great literary undertaking, it occupies the ninth place.

in previous decades a chemical company took to the Supreme Court a case asserting its Fourth Amendment “right to privacy” from the Environmental Protection Agency’s snooping into its illegal chemical discharges.

Anytime there’s even a hint of the government limiting the public’s ability to buy guns, people go crazy about them taking away our freedom, but this new law that gives the government the right to spy into every aspect of your life, without your consent—barely a peep. A clear violation of the third and fourth amendments, but nobody says a word.” He

Again, there's nothing in Section 702 that authorizes mass surveillance. The NSA justifies the use by abusing the word "incidental." Everything is intercepted, both metadata and content, and automatically searched for items of interest. The NSA claims that only the things it wants to save count as searching. Everything else is incidental, and as long as its intended "target" is outside the US, it's all okay. A useful analogy would be allowing police officers to search every house in the city without any probable cause or warrant, looking for a guy who normally lives in Bulgaria. They would save evidence of any crimes they happened to find, and then argue that none of the other searches counted because they hadn't found anything, and what they found was admissable as evidence because it was "incidental" to the search for the Bulgarian. The Fourth Amendment specifically prohibits that sort of search as unreasonable, and for good reason.

The American founders did not create their experiment in religious liberty out of nothing. The principles of religious liberty outlined in the First Amendment were a part and product of nearly two centuries of colonial experience, and nearly two millennia of European history and thought.

The Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution, which were established to protect us from unwarranted intrusion by the government into our private lives, may still technically be law but they have been judicially abolished. The Fourth Amendment was written in 1789 in direct response to the arbitrary and unchecked search powers that the British had exercised through general warrants called “writs of assistance”, which played a significant part in fomenting the American Revolution. The amendment limits the sate’s ability to search and seize to a specific place, time, and event approved by a magistrate. It is impossible to square the bluntness of the Fourth Amendment with the arbitrary search and seizure of all our personal communications.

June, Congress drew up and quickly passed the Fourteenth Amendment that would, once ratified by three-fourths of the states, safeguard the equal-citizenship provisions of the new Civil Rights Act by enshrining them in the Constitution. The amendment would protect the Civil Rights Act from the Supreme Court by invalidating the Dred Scott ruling that African-Americans were not citizens. Since the Constitution assigns the president no role in the amendment

Americans don't care about privacy, and the people running the country couldn't be happier.

As Davies reads the historical evidence, the immediate purpose of the Fourth Amendment was to prohibit general warrants and their like, but “the larger purpose for which the Framers adopted the text . . . [was] to curb the exercise of discretionary authority by officers.

The debate among feminists about pregnancy benefits has had dramatic implications for the legal status of the right to choose abortion itself. As Ginsburg noted in a 1986 article, “The characterization of pregnancy discrimination as sex discrimination, requires the comparative analysis of the equal protection model. Its emphasis is on what is not unique about the reproductive process of women.” By contrast, the difference that feminists focus on is what is unique about childbirth. They advocate special treatment for pregnant women based on their premise that men and women are not “similarly situated” because of their reproductive differences. This was the same premise that Justice Stewart had invoked in his 1974 holding that discrimination against pregnant women is permissible. That’s why Ginsburg’s insistence that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is a form of discrimination on the basis of sex is so central to her search for alternatives to the right to privacy, which does not appear explicitly in the Constitution, as a firm legal basis for protecting women’s reproductive rights. Ginsburg has been far more willing to enforce privacy rights for women when they can be tied to the text of the Constitution, such as the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures.

There is no right of privacy written into the Constitution. There is the Fourth Amendment, protecting people against unreasonable searches and seizures. But there is a notion, an important notion, of liberty—that we should have liberty to carry on with our lives without Big Brother Government looking over our shoulder. That idea has come from the guarantee, the due process guarantee of liberty, rather than an explicit right of privacy.

Every conspiracy is a story of people. The protagonists of this one are two of the most distinctly unique personalities of their time, Nick Denton and Peter Thiel. Two characters who, not unlike the cowboys in your cliché western, found that the town—whether it was Silicon Valley or New York City or the world’s stage—was not big enough for them to coexist. The gravitational pull of the two figures would bring dozens of other people into their orbit over their ten-year cold war along with the FBI, the First and Fourth Amendments, and soon enough, the president of the United States. It somehow dragged me in, too. In 2016, I would find myself the recipient of unsolicited emails from both Peter Thiel and Nick Denton. Both wanted to talk, both were intrigued to hear I had spoken to the other. Both gave me questions to ask the other. And so for more than a year, I spent hundreds of hours researching, writing about, and speaking to nearly everyone involved. I would read more than twenty thousand pages of legal documents and pore through the history of media, of feuds, of warfare, and of strategy not only to make sense of what happened here, but to make something more than just some work of contemporary long-form journalism or some chronological retelling of events by a disinterested observer (which I am not). The result is a different kind of book from my other work, but given this extraordinary story, I had little choice. What follows then are both the facts and the lessons from this conflict—an extended meditation on what it means to successfully conspire, on the one hand, and how to be caught defenseless against a conspiracy and be its victim, on the other. So that we can see what power and conviction look like in real terms, as well as the costs of hubris, and recklessness. And because winning is typically preferable to losing, this book is about how one man came to experience what Genghis Khan supposedly called the greatest of life’s pleasures: to overcome your enemies, to drive them before you, to see their friends and allies bathed in tears, to take their possessions as your own. The question of justice is beside the point; every conqueror believes their cause just and righteous—a thought that makes the fruits taste sweeter.

Onward Christian Lawyers KELLY SHACKELFORD, LIBERTY LEGAL INSTITUTE, PLANO, TEXAS Kelly Shackelford founded Liberty Legal Institute in 1997 to fight for the protection of religious freedoms and First Amendment rights for individuals, groups, and churches. Shackelford clerked for a federal judge after law school. "When their freedoms are taken away, the average person isn't 0. J. Simpson and can't just go out and hire the dream team. My heart has always been to make sure that those people have the best representation possible so that the government can't erode all of our freedoms by picking on the people who don't have the money to fight. "Religion is the new pornography. If somebody says something religious, the average government official feels like he or she has to run from the room, screaming with their hair on fire. Religion is treated like pornography would be treated if you brought it into the school. I mean, there's a fear. There's a shame, almost, directed toward it. "The ACLU is mainly operating on remote control. They've injected this chilling atmosphere that's antireligious in the schools and they don't even have to do anything in most instances to effectuate a religious cleansing in the schools. They've managed to scare and intimidate and the lore in school districts is religion is bad, religion will get you in trouble. ''I'd say a decent percentage of the time, the person who engages in the violation of our clients' rights is somebody who later will tell us, Tm a religious person.' They just didn't know any better, and what they're doing is reacting. They go to the kneejerk, shut-it-down action. 'Oh, it's religion? We must shut it down .' That is the general approach. "These are young kids. They're in third grade or fourth grade or fifth grade. And the lesson they learn is there are words you can't say. You can't say these curse words, and then you can't say your religion. You can't talk about your religion. And it's a very powerful message. "We had a case where the kids could could draw a tracing of their foot, then put a message on the drawing of their foot, and then put it up on the board in class. And all these kids had all these very innocuous messages, 'Jenny loves Johnny' and 'Peace' and such. A girl very innocently wrote 'Jesus Loves Me.' And the teacher ripped it down, and said to her, 'Don't you ever do this again.' The girl went home crying and wondering what she'd done wrong. "The father was just infuriated. We called the school. And that time, the school had already realized they were in big trouble. And so they went back to this little girl and they told her, unbeknownst to any of us, 'Go ahead and do another - go ahead and do another one and put it up.' She redrew her foot. And instead of writing 'Jesus Loves Me' in the innocent and pure way she did before, she put a little tiny cross up in the very top corner that you could just barely see. ''And I thought, 'There's the picture of what happens inside to these little kids.' She's learned the lesson. Don't be open about your faith. Don't be honest about your faith. Hide it. You can still be whoever you are as long as you'll hide it. They taught her selfoppression and self-censorship through this hysterical reaction to her. They robbed her of that innocence and of that purity of being open about her faith. "That's the sort of thing I decided to fight.