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3 unusual facts about Fourth Amendment


Fourth Amendment

Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of South Africa, which made technical changes related to the election of provincial legislature and the National Council of Provinces

Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, part of the Bill of Rights, prohibiting unreasonable searches, seizures, and recognizing Americans' natural right of privacy.

Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland, which lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen


Abdulameer Yousef Habeeb

Habeeb's attorneys charged that the agents had stopped Habeeb for his ethnic appearance, and that his detention violated his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

Atwater v. Lago Vista

Atwater and her husband, Michael Haas, an emergency room physician at a local hospital, filed suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 with Charles Lincoln being the lawyer who launched the case, alleging that the city violated her Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizures by arresting her for a crime whose only punishment was a fine.

Darryl Cherney

Cherney and the late Bari's estate were awarded $4.4 million for violations of the First Amendment (freedom of speech) and the Fourth Amendment (the right to be free from unlawful arrest and illegal search and seizure).

Edward C. Lawson

The Ninth Circuit held that § 647(e) violated the Fourth Amendment because it allowed arrest without probable cause, that it was void for vagueness, and that it invited arbitrary enforcement.

Mark Reichel

Reichel argued in this case that the Fourth Amendment requires officers to provide a copy of the search warrant to the homeowner when conducting a search.

National security letter

Judge Victor Marrero of the Southern District of New York found on 28 September 2004, that NSLs violate the Fourth Amendment ("it has the effect of authorizing coercive searches effectively immune from any judicial process") and First Amendment.

William Worthy

In 1981, the luggage of Worthy and two other journalists working with him, Terri Taylor and Randy Goodman, was seized by the FBI and CIA on their return from Iran; and they subsequently won a suit on Fourth Amendment grounds.


see also

Berger v. New York

This holding predates by several months the more famous case of Katz v. United States, which extended Fourth Amendment protection to a conversation in a public phone booth based on the speaker's reasonable expectation of privacy.

Fourth Amendment Restoration Act

The Fourth Amendment Restoration Act is a proposed bill introduced by Senator Rand Paul on June 7, 2013.

Race and the War on Drugs

The idea that minorities have to somehow “prove” that racial discrimination was being used during a search and seizure (United States v. Armstrong, 1996) and that the Equal Protection Law has been separated from the Fourth Amendment through successive court decisions leaves the accused at a disadvantage.

Random checkpoint

The Michigan Supreme Court had found sobriety roadblocks to be a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote, "In sum, the balance of the State's interest in preventing drunken driving, the extent to which this system can reasonably be said to advance that interest, and the degree of intrusion upon individual motorists who are briefly stopped, weighs in favor of the state program. We therefore hold that it is consistent with the Fourth Amendment."

Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association

The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) has used this ruling to expanded the "special needs doctrine" that carves out an exception to the Fourth Amendment for the broad collection and examination of Americans' data to track possible terrorists.

United States v. Graham

In Katz v. United States, Justice Harlan evolved a two-prong test to determine when an object may be the subject of a Fourth Amendment protection.

Winston v. Lee

Winston v. Lee, 470 U.S. 753 (1985), was a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which held that a compelled surgical intrusion into an individual's body for evidence implicates expectations of privacy and security of such magnitude that the intrusion would be "unreasonable" under the Fourth Amendment, even if likely to produce evidence of a crime.