Two More Ways Not to Think About Privacy and the Fourth Amendment
20 Pages Posted: 2 Aug 2014 Last revised: 27 Mar 2015
Date Written: August 1, 2014
Abstract
This brief essay challenges two increasingly common ideas about privacy and the Fourth Amendment. The first is that any protections needed against government infringements of privacy in the Information Age are best developed outside of the courts and outside of constitutional law. The second is that the various puzzles encountered when thinking about privacy and the Fourth Amendment can be solved or circumvented through some kind of invocation of the past: either a focus on the text of the Fourth Amendment, or the study of its history, or an effort to preserve the amount privacy that used to exist, either when the Fourth Amendment was adopted or at some later point.
Keywords: privacy, Fourth Amendment, search and seizure
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