Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Fourth Amendment

Criminal Law

: Fourth Amendment

Heller on interpreting the Bill of Rights

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

The Second Amendment case, D.C. v. Heller, 07-2901 (U.S. June 26, 2008), held today that the Second Amendment protects the personal right to possess arms in the home, with a few exceptions. There are these paragraphs of interest to interpreting the Fourth Amendment: What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention “the people,” the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset. As we said in United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U. S. 259, 265 (1990): “‘[T]he people’ seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution. ... [Its uses] sugges[t] that ‘the people’ protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on June 26, 2008 (boomark / email).