Case Quotes
This is a section intended to be perpetually in progress added Dec. 23, 04.
It will be added to as I get the time from important quotes from cases for readers to use in briefs, so check back from time to time. This will take a long time to complete.
Interpreting the Fourth Amendment:
United States v Rabinowitz (1950) 339 US 56, 68-69, 94 L Ed 653, 70 S Ct 430 (Frankfurter, J., dissenting) (overruled by Chimel v California (1969) 395 US 752, 23 L Ed 2d 685, 89 S Ct 2034):
The old saw that hard cases make bad law has its basis in experience. But petty cases are even more calculated to make bad law. The impact of a sordid little case is apt to obscure the implications of the generalization to which the case gives rise. Only thus can I account for a disregard of the history embedded in the Fourth Amendment and the great place which belongs to that Amendment in the body of our liberties as recognized and applied by unanimous decisions over a long stretch of the Court's history.
It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth Amendment. A disregard of the historic materials underlying the Amendment does not answer them.
. . . It is true also of journeys in the law that the place you reach depends on the direction you are taking. And so, where one comes out on a case depends on where one goes in. It makes all the difference in the world whether one approaches the Fourth Amendment as the Court approached it in Boyd v United States, 116 US 616, in Weeks v United States, 232 US 383, in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v United States, 251 US 385, in Gouled v United States, 255 US 298, or one approaches it as a provision dealing with a formality. It makes all the difference in the world whether one recognizes the central fact about the Fourth Amendment, namely, that it was a safeguard against recurrence of abuses so deeply felt by the Colonies as to be one of the potent causes of the Revolution, or one thinks of it as merely a requirement for a piece of paper.
Reasonableness of a search and seizure:
Terry v Ohio (1968) 392 US 1, 18-19, 20 L Ed 2d 889, 88 S Ct 1868:
[A] search which is reasonable at its inception may violate the Fourth Amendment by virtue of its intolerable intensity and scope. . The scope of the search must be "strictly tied to and justified by" the circumstances which rendered its initiation permissible.
United States v Chadwick (1977) 433 US 1, 9, 53 L Ed 2d 538, 97 S Ct 2476 (diverged from on other grounds by California v Acevedo (1991) 500 US 565, 114 L Ed 2d 619, 111 S Ct 1982):
[The] fundamental inquiry in considering Fourth Amendment issues
is whether or not a search or seizure is reasonable under all the
circumstances.
Accord, e.g.: Griffin v Wisconsin (1987) 483 US 868, 873, 97 L Ed 2d 709, 107 S Ct 3164; Bell v Wolfish (1979) 441 US 520, 557, 60 L Ed 2d 447, 99 S Ct 1861; South Dakota v Opperman (1976) 428 US 364, 369-70, 49 L Ed 2d 1000, 96 S Ct 3092; Cady v Dombrowski (1973) 413 US 433, 439, 37 L Ed 2d 706, 93 S Ct 2523.
Terry, 392 US at 21-22:
And in justifying the particular intrusion the police officer must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with the rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that intrusion. The scheme of the Fourth Amendment becomes meaningful only when it is assured that at some point the conduct of those charged with enforcing the laws can be subjected to the more detached, neutral scrutiny of a judge who must evaluate the reasonableness of a particular search or seizure in light of the particular circumstances. And in making that assessment it is imperative that the facts be judged against an objective standard: would the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure or the search "warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief" that the action taken was appropriate? . Anything less would invite intrusions upon constitutionally guaranteed rights based on nothing more substantial than inarticulate hunches, a result this Court has consistently refused to sanction.