Fourth Amendment

It’s nearly impossible to separate modern-day gun laws from race.

The Supreme Court has found protections for people’s privacy in several constitutional amendments – and used it as a basis for some fundamental protections.

The theory has not provided the clarity some of its early proponents had hoped it would.

Since the invention of the automobile, police have used the dangers of America's roads to justify their growing oversight of motorists.

Violence perpetrated by cops doesn’t simply boil down to individual bad actors—it’s also a systemic, judicial failing.

Most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws. Then the car changed everything.

The brewing conflict between originalism and law-and-order politics.

The Supreme Court punts on Hernandez v. Mesa, leaving the Constitution lost in the borderlands.

King George's tax collectors abused police powers to fill his coffers. Sound familiar?

American bureaucracy's long and useful history.

From the outset of the American Revolution, a lingering problem that plagued the minds of the Continental Congress dealt with its financing.

James Oakes’s deeply researched book argues that two very different readings of the 1787 charter put the United States on a course of all but inevitable conflict.

Two new books make a devastating case against claims that the Constitution should be interpreted on the basis of its purported “original meaning.”

The public widely opposed wiretapping until the 1970s. What changed?

Did the Confederacy have a constitutional right to secede? And did Lincoln violate the Constitution in forcing them back into the Union and freeing the slaves?

The system's roots aren't in rescuing children, but in the policing of Black, Indigenous, and poor families.

For a century, we’ve loved our cars. They haven’t loved us back.

The Supreme Court is quietly gutting one of the United States’ most important civil rights statutes.

The vagrancy law regime regulated so much more than what is generally considered “vagrancy.”

How nativism and racism shaped the national movement towards Prohibition.