Title: The Structure of the Fourth Amendment: The Scope of the Protection
Abstract: scope and content issues, though less apparent, is even more common in the Court's decisions, and often occurs, one suspects, in the quest for a particular result. 7 These same structural components may be viewed as pawns in a political controversy that inheres in organized society: the tension between the individual claim to privacy and autonomy and the collective demand for crime control and security. 8Every fourth amendment decision chooses, at the margin, which of these opposing values to prefer, and the doctrine reflects and accommodates that choice.The immediate task is to explicate the analytic categories through which that accommodation is expressed. I. THE ANALYTIC FRAMEWORK OF PRIVACYThis Article makes two claims for the analytic structure it describes.First, that the analysis applies to any attempt to give legal protection to privacy, regardless of the particular text by which that protection is expressed.State constitutions, such as those of Arizona 9 and Washington, 1 0 that mention neither searches, seizures, warrants nor probable cause, nonetheless generate doctrines that fit comfortably within the analytic categories.Second, the components of the analytic framework presented here are comprehensive (although not exclusive).Every fourth amendment issue falls within a particular analytic category, and although the categories overlap, they do so in instructive ways.Of course, these are empty claims unless the analysis also facilitates one's ability to understand, assess and use privacy doctrine.The proof of that is in the analytic scheme.