Rescues the Fourth Amendment's positive aspects and its forgotten history

The modern law of search and seizure permits warrantless searches that ruin the citizenry's trust in law enforcement, harms minorities, and embraces an individualistic notion of the rights that it protects, ignoring essential roles that properly-conceived protections of privacy, mobility, and property play in uniting Americans. Many believe the Fourth Amendment is a poor bulwark against state tyrannies, particularly during the War on Terror.
Historical amnesia has obscured the Fourth Amendment's positive aspects, and Andrew E. Taslitz rescues its forgotten history in Reconstructing the Fourth Amendment, which includes two novel arguments. First, that the original Fourth Amendment of 1791—born in political struggle between the English and the colonists—served important political functions, particularly in regulating expressive political violence. Second, that the Amendment’s meaning changed when the Fourteenth Amendment was created to give teeth to outlawing slavery, and its focus shifted from primary emphasis on individualistic privacy notions as central to a white democratic polis to enhanced protections for group privacy, individual mobility, and property in a multi-racial republic.
With an understanding of the historical roots of the Fourth Amendment, suggests Taslitz, we can upend negative assumptions of modern search and seizure law, and create new institutional approaches that give political voice to citizens and safeguard against unnecessary humiliation and dehumanization at the hands of the police.

"Insightful in its approach to the Fourth Amendment, not only in terms of the law itself, but what is searched and seized, who particularly is subject to search and seizure, and what abuses led to broadening, thus capturing the full rich detail of the Fourth Amendment. . . .Taslitz shows us in thorough fashion that we would be wise to learn from the past as we address the problems facing our society." - Law and Politics Book Review

"An exciting and original work of history. . . . [A] bracing contribution to the somewhat dormant field of constitutional history . . . that will be of interest to any historian of the Constitution. The book's main accomplishment is that it combines contemporary and historical arguments without slighting either, while providing important new evidence and insight into each." - Journal of American History

"An outstanding scholarly achievement in the area of constitutional history and criminal procedure, particularly the law of search and seizure." - Criminal Justice Review