The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets requirements for issuing warrants: warrants must be issued by a judge or magistrate, justified by probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
Wolf v. Colorado, 338 U.S. 25 (1949), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held 6—3 that, while the Fourth Amendment was applicable to the states, the exclusionary rule was not a necessary ingredient of the Fourth Amendment's right against warrantless and unreasonable searches and seizures. In Weeks v. United States, 232 U.S. 383 (1914), the Court held that as a matter of judicial implication the exclusionary rule was enforceable in federal courts but not derived from the explicit requirements of the Fourth Amendment. The Wolf Court decided not to incorporate the exclusionary rule as part of the Fourteenth Amendment in large part because the states which had rejected the Weeks Doctrine had not left the right to privacy without other means of protection. However, because most of the states' rules proved to be ineffective in deterrence, the Court overruled Wolf in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961). That landmark case made history as the exclusionary rule enforceable against the states through the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the same extent that it applied against the federal government.
Florida v. Riley, 488 U.S. 445 (1989), was a United States Supreme Court decision which held that police officials do not need a warrant to observe an individual's property from public airspace.
Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled that citizens of the United States may not be deprived of their citizenship involuntarily. The U.S. government had attempted to revoke the citizenship of Beys Afroyim, a man born in Poland, because he had cast a vote in an Israeli election after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. The Supreme Court decided that Afroyim's right to retain his citizenship was guaranteed by the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In so doing, the Court struck down a federal law mandating loss of U.S. citizenship for voting in a foreign election—thereby overruling one of its own precedents, Perez v. Brownell (1958), in which it had upheld loss of citizenship under similar circumstances less than a decade earlier.
In United States constitutional law, expectation of privacy is a legal test which is crucial in defining the scope of the applicability of the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It is related to, but is not the same as, a right to privacy, a much broader concept which is found in many legal systems. Overall, expectations of privacy can be subjective or objective.
Frank Ezekiel Holman (1886–1967) was an American attorney known for his 1948 effort to amend the United States Constitution to limit the power of treaties and executive agreements. Holman's work led to the Bricker Amendment.
Toilet Goods Association, Inc. v. Gardner, 387 U.S. 158 (1967), was a case heard before the United States Supreme Court. It held that judicial review of a regulation's validity was inappropriate because the controversy was not ripe for adjudication. Since it was not clear whether or not an inspection would be ordered and the reasons had not been given by the Commissioner to justify his order, no primary conduct was affected and so no irremediable adverse consequences flowed from requiring a later challenge to the regulation by a manufacturer, who refused to allow inspection.
Reitman v. Mulkey, 387 U.S. 369 (1967), was a United States Supreme Court decision that set an important legal precedent that held that a state could not authorize invidious discrimination by private landlords without entangling itself in the ensuing discriminatory private decisions. Thus, the state constitutional amendment by referendum purporting to authorize landlord freedom was unconstitutional.
Frank v. Maryland, 359 U.S. 360 (1959), was a United States Supreme Court case interpreting the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Waller v. Florida, 397 U.S. 387 (1970), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court, which held that the Double Jeopardy Clause protects defendants from successive prosecutions by states and municipalities for offenses based on the same criminal conduct.
Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616 (1886) was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in which the Court held that "a search and seizure [was] equivalent [to] a compulsory production of a man's private papers" and that the search was "an 'unreasonable search and seizure' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment."
Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757 (1966), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court clarified the application of the Fourth Amendment's protection against warrantless searches and the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for searches that intrude into the human body. Until Schmerber, the Supreme Court had not yet clarified whether state police officers must procure a search warrant before taking blood samples from criminal suspects. Likewise, the Court had not yet clarified whether blood evidence taken against the wishes of a criminal suspect may be used against that suspect in the course of a criminal prosecution.
Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, 413 U.S. 266 (1973), was a United States Supreme Court case holding that the search of an automobile by the United States Border Patrol without a warrant or probable cause violates the Fourth Amendment. The vehicle was stopped and searched for illegal aliens twenty-five miles (40 km) from the Mexican border. The Court approached the search from four views: automobile search, administrative inspection, heavily regulated industry inspection, and border search. As to the validity of the search under the automobile exception, the Court found no justification for the search under the Carroll doctrine because there was no probable cause. As to the validity of the search under various administrative inspection doctrines, the Court found that the officers lacked an area warrant. As to the validity of the heavily regulated industry inspection, the Court found that the doctrine is not applicable to traveling on a state highway. As to the validity of a border search, the Court found that the site of the stop and the entirety of the road on which the stop occurred was too far from the border to be considered a border search.
Maryland v. Buie, 494 U.S. 325 (1990), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States handed down in 1990. In the case, the Court held that the Fourth Amendment permits a properly limited protective sweep in conjunction with an in-home arrest when the searching officer possesses a reasonable belief based on specific and articulable facts that the area to be swept harbors an individual posing a danger to those on the arrest scene.
Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. 443 (2011), is a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court held that speech made in a public place on a matter of public concern cannot be the basis of liability for a tort of emotional distress, even if the speech is viewed as offensive or outrageous.
In the law of the United States, the mere evidence rule was a historical doctrine that defined the scope of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Marcus v. Search Warrant, 367 U.S. 717 (1961), full title Marcus v. Search Warrant of Property at 104 East Tenth Street, Kansas City, Missouri, is an in rem case decided by the United States Supreme Court on the seizure of obscene materials. The Court unanimously overturned a Missouri Supreme Court decision upholding the forfeiture of hundreds of magazines confiscated from a Kansas City wholesaler. It held that both Missouri's procedures for the seizure of allegedly obscene material and the execution of the warrant itself violated the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments' prohibitions on search and seizure without due process. Those violations, in turn, threatened the rights protected by the First Amendment.
Soldal v. Cook County, 506 U.S. 56 (1992), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that a seizure of property like that which occurs during an eviction, even absent a search or an arrest, implicates the Fourth Amendment. The Court also held that the Amendment protects property as well as privacy interests, in both criminal as well as civil contexts. Finally, saying that "certain wrongs affect more than a single right", the Court left open the possibility that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections against deprivation of property without due process of law may also be implicated.
Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U.S. 523 (1967), is a United States Supreme Court case that overruled a previous case and established the ability of a resident to deny entry to a building inspector without a warrant.
Brown v. Maryland, 25 U.S. 419 (1827), was a significant United States Supreme Court case which interpreted the Import-Export and Commerce Clauses of the U.S. Constitution to prohibit discriminatory taxation by states against imported items after importation, rather than only at the time of importation. The state of Maryland passed a law requiring importers of foreign goods to obtain a license for selling their products. Brown was charged under this law and appealed. It was the first case in which the U.S. Supreme Court construed the Import-Export Clause. Chief Justice John Marshall delivered the opinion of the court, ruling that Maryland's statute violated the Import-Export and Commerce Clauses and the federal law was supreme. He alleged that the power of a state to tax goods did not apply if they remained in their "original package". A license tax on the importer was essentially the same as a tax on an import itself. Despite arguing the case for Maryland, future chief justice Roger Taney admitted that the case was correctly decided.
