Reconstructing the Fourth Amendment

View the Table of Contents. Read the Preface.Reconstructing the Fourth Amendment is a remarkable scholarly accomplishment. It presents one of the most radical challenges to standard constitutional thinking--not just about searches and seizures but also about the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment as a protection of individual rights--in recent literature. Andrew Taslitz stakes out a radical and compelling position on a pressing contemporary issue--the protection of individual privacy against government invasion--and does so on impeccably researched and intellectually conservative grounds. It is a must read.--H. Jefferson Powell, author of A Community Built on Words: The Constitution in History and PoliticsTaslitz's analysis provides a unique vision of the Fourth Amendment's purpose: to tame political violence from governmental officials, while forcing officials to treat each individual with respect and dignity. Taslitz's research on the search and seizure practices of Southern states during Reconstruction is illuminating and strengthens his thesis that respect for the individual lies at the core of the Fourth Amendment.--Tracey Maclin, Professor of Law, Boston University School of LawFourth Amendment scholarship has hitherto emphasized the amendment's background and gestation, i.e., the period before its inception in 1789. Taslitz, however, has removed a critical gap in that scholarship by illuminating the amendment's development after 1789, through the ante-bellum and Reconstruction periods, until 1868. Taslitz breaks new ground by exploring the Fourth Amendment's connections with political violence and slavery. He introduces readers to the interpretative diversity of and among scholars who debate the amendment's original and current contents.--William Cuddihy, author of The Fourth Amendment: Origins and Original Meaning, 602-1791The modern law of search and seizure permits warrantless searches that ruin the citizenry's trust in law enforcement, harms minorities, and embraces an individualistic notion of the rights that it protects, ignoring essential roles that properly-conceived protections of privacy, mobility, and property play in uniting Americans. Many believe the Fourth Amendment is a poor bulwark against state tyrannies, particularly during the War on Terror.Historical amnesia has obscured the Fourth Amendment's positive aspects, and Andrew E. Taslitz rescues its forgotten history in Reconstructing the Fourth Amendment, which includes two novel arguments. First, that the original Fourth Amendment of 1791--born in political struggle between the English and the colonists--served important political functions, particularly in regulating expressive political violence. Second, that the Amendment's meaning changed when the Fourteenth Amendment was created to give teeth to outlawing slavery, and its focus shifted from primary emphasis on individualistic privacy notions as central to a white democratic polis to enhanced protections for group privacy, individual mobility, and property in a multi-racial republic. With an understanding of the historical roots of the Fourth Amendment, suggests Taslitz, we can upend negative assumptions of modern search and seizure law, and create new institutional approaches that give political voice to citizens and safeguard against unnecessary humiliation and dehumanization at the hands of the police.