Case v. Montana · ¶43

It should come as no surprise that our decision today might accord with the accumulated learning of the common law—just as it should come as no surprise that our application of the Fourth Amendment ought to be informed by the common law's lessons rather than mere intuition. For a period, to be sure, the miasma created by this Court's Katz era led some to think the scope of the rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment depend on nothing more than current judicial instincts about “reasonable expectations of privacy.” See Carpenter, 585 U. S., at 394–395, 405–406 (Gorsuch, J., dissenting). But that confusion cannot last forever, for no one should think the rights of Americans hang on so thin a thread. Instead, and as Justice Story recognized, the Fourth Amendment is made of sturdier stuff, representing “the affirmance of a great constitutional doctrine of the common law.” 3 Commentaries on…

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