4th Amendment Search & Seizure

The Fourth Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights which was established in the seventeenth and eighteenth century English common law. Aside from the rest of the amendments in the Bill of Rights the Fourth Amendment can be traced back to a strong public reaction from some cases back in the 1760s. Two of these cases happened in England and one case happened in the colonies. These cases involved some pamphleteers who would pass out pamphlets to the public in order to spread their word around. These pamphlets however ridiculed the king and his ministers. After finding this out the king issued warrants to have the pamphleteer’s homes ransacked and stripped of all their books and papers. Even back then the pamphleteers knew that their rights were violated and fought back. They stated that the searches were against them, similar to a “personal attack” rather than an attack on their information they held within their homes. This is an extremely early case dealing with search and seizure, if not one of the first cases, in which the individuals being searched stood up for themselves because they felt the actions taken against them were unjust. However, since these cases are dated so far back in history it is hard to understand whether our founder fathers could have foreseen any problems with the amendment in the future, and everything that applies under the fourth amendment today. At the end of the eighteenth century this was dealing with pamphlets that the king did not like and tried to extinguish through tearing apart the “offender’s” homes. Is it possible however that even this amendment that was ratified at the end of 1791 can still be completely relevant in our modern society, or does this amendment need a face lift? In the beginning this amendment did not deal with serious things that needed to be apprehended from the public, this amendment was about protecting the citizen’s rights. Well this started out with pamphlets but everybody knows all the problems that