The Fourth Amendment: Original Understandings and Modern Policing

The Fourth Amendment:Original Understandings and Modern Policing is a remarkable work of both constitutional history and interpretation. The basis premise of the book is that contemporary constitutional doctrine has the Fourth Amendment completely backwards. Rather than imposing a nation wide standard of rules for what constitutes a search and a seizure, the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment originally applied solely to the federal government through the various state laws in place. Thus, the federal government was required to obey state law in the exercise of its own power.Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment did alter this original understanding of the Fourth Amendment but the author argues that this alteration of original federalism must be understood within the confines of Reconstruction Republicans continued respect for states rights. Now the federal government does have more power to ensure that the states are following the Constitution though the Privileges and Immunities, Due Process, and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the states still retain principal authority over what governs a search and seizure. The author also lists three principals that the states must follow to be consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment: nondiscrimination, legality, and nondelegation. All this serves a basic purpose: to constrain the exercise of power of executive officials pursuant to the specials power of law enforwment, thus ensuring that ultimately police officers obey the law that would normally constrain private persons.Highly recommend.