"Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment"
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O'Connor doesn’t dress this up as abstract liberty talk; she drags the Fourth Amendment back to its most inconvenient starting point: the government’s instinct to legalize intrusion. The phrase "statutes authorizing" is doing the heavy lifting. It’s a reminder that the Framers weren’t only worried about rogue officers kicking down doors. They were worried about legislatures and kings laundering coercion through paperwork, turning surveillance into "policy" and rummaging into a routine.
Calling those statutes the "core concern" is also a tactical move in constitutional argument. O'Connor is narrowing the interpretive battlefield. If the Fourth Amendment is fundamentally a reaction against officially sanctioned, unreasonable searches, then modern courts should be skeptical when the state points to a statute as if legality equals legitimacy. Her subtext: a warrantless dragnet doesn’t become more constitutional just because it was voted on and neatly codified.
Context matters here. As a pragmatic conservative and institutionalist, O'Connor often tried to keep constitutional rights tethered to workable rules rather than moral poetry. Invoking the Framers is a way to speak in the Supreme Court’s native dialect: history as constraint, not decoration. But it’s also a warning aimed at the present: the real danger is not only misconduct; it’s normalcy. The Fourth Amendment, in her framing, is less a shield against individual bad actors than a structural check against the state’s talent for making unreasonable searches feel administratively inevitable.
Calling those statutes the "core concern" is also a tactical move in constitutional argument. O'Connor is narrowing the interpretive battlefield. If the Fourth Amendment is fundamentally a reaction against officially sanctioned, unreasonable searches, then modern courts should be skeptical when the state points to a statute as if legality equals legitimacy. Her subtext: a warrantless dragnet doesn’t become more constitutional just because it was voted on and neatly codified.
Context matters here. As a pragmatic conservative and institutionalist, O'Connor often tried to keep constitutional rights tethered to workable rules rather than moral poetry. Invoking the Framers is a way to speak in the Supreme Court’s native dialect: history as constraint, not decoration. But it’s also a warning aimed at the present: the real danger is not only misconduct; it’s normalcy. The Fourth Amendment, in her framing, is less a shield against individual bad actors than a structural check against the state’s talent for making unreasonable searches feel administratively inevitable.
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| Topic | Justice |
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