Warrantless Searches Part 1 - Historical Context of the 4th Amendment

From before the American Revolution, to the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, the drafters of the Fourth Amendment sought to guarantee to future generations the same property-rights protections they had acquired over centuries.

Verbatim:

Americans have always cherished their right to be secure. Before the American Revolution, government officials used general warrants to search and seize colonists’ property at will. These warrants gave officials unlimited power, since they specified neither the places to be searched nor what items to be seized.  

Americans were outraged. John Adams and the other revolutionaries understood if government officials could search and seize us and our property at will, no one could feel or be safe. That’s why the Declaration of Independence says the purpose of government is “to secure [our] rights,” and why it complained that King George III had “sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance” using general warrants. 

But once the war was over, Adams and others recognized their own governments could threaten their security just as King George’s men did. So Adams drafted Article 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, which not only banned general warrants, but recognized that “[e]very subject has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches and seizures of his person, his house, his papers, and all his possessions.” Numerous other states drafted similar constitutional provisions.

Many feared federal officials would run roughshod over these rights, so they called for guarantees in the U.S. Constitution against “hasty and unreasonable search warrants, warrants not founded on oath, and not issued with due caution, for searching and seizing men’s papers, property, and persons.” 

The Fourth Amendment is the response to those calls. It shines light on the right to be secure, with a focus on well understood property rights. By drafting the Fourth Amendment, the Framers sought to guarantee to future generations the same property-rights protections they had acquired over centuries.  

One critical right the Framers sought to protect was the right to exclude other people from your property. Both the Framers and English Common law stated that “a man’s house is his castle.” It meant that, absent a valid warrant or a true emergency, neither the King nor his officers could enter your property. That’s why the Framers used the term “secure,” which contemporary dictionaries defined as “protected from . . . danger” and “free from fear.” After all, property isn’t truly yours if you fear government officials may break down the door at any moment. That’s why Adams himself said “[p]roperty must be secured, or liberty cannot exist.”  

The purpose of the Amendment was to broadly protect us from government intrusion against our persons and property at will. The Framers had just fought a revolution against the King’s general warrants; they wanted to prevent any chance their own government would commit the same abuses.

As Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story wrote in one of the first major texts about the U.S. Constitution, the Fourth Amendment “seems indispensable to the full enjoyment of the rights of personal security, personal liberty, and private property. It is little more than the affirmance of a great constitutional doctrine of the common law.”