TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2000//
TI  - The Fourth Amendment and common law
JO  - Columbia law review
A1  - Sklansky, D. A.
SP  - 1739
EP  - 1814
VL  - 100
IS  - 7
N2  - In several recent cases the Supreme Court has declared that the   principal criterion for assessing whether searches and seizures are   "unreasonable" within the meaning of the Constitution is whether they   were allowed by eighteenth-century common law. This new form of Fourth   Amendment originalism breaks dramatically not only with the ahistoric   approach of the Warren and Burger Courts to search-and-seizure   questions, but also with an older tradition of using the background of   the Fourth Amendment to illuminate not its precise demands but its   general aims.   This Article traces the emergence of the new Fourth Amendment miginalism   and argues that the doctrine has little to recommend it. The Court's   revised understanding of the Fourth Amendment is faithful neither to the   text of the Amendment nor to what we Know of its intent. And anchoring   the Fourth Amendment in common law will do little to make it more   principled of predictable, in part because common-law limits on searches   and seizures were thinner, vaguer, and far more varied than the Court   seems to suppose. What the common law has of value to offer Fourth   Amendment law is what it has to offer constitutional law more generally:   not its rules but its method.<p /> 
LA  - 
SN  - 0010-1958
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1123590
ID  - ref1
ER  -