The Fourth Amendment: From General Warrants To Probable Cause

Civics In A Year

We trace the Fourth Amendment from colonial protests against general warrants to modern rules for warrants, cars, phones, and digital surveillance. We explain probable cause, reasonableness, and how courts adapt old principles to new technology without watering them down.
• roots in English common law and colonial resistance to general warrants
• James Otis’s protest and John Adams’s influence on state constitutions
• probable cause, sworn affidavits, and particularity in warrants
• the automobile exception and Carroll’s articulation requirement
• defining reasonableness versus arbitrary searches
• Kyllo and technology that reveals home details
• Katz’s reasonable expectation of privacy alongside trespass
• Jones and GPS tracking as both trespass and privacy intrusion
• metadata, mass surveillance, and the limits of older precedents
• why recent Fourth Amendment cases often show cross‑ideological agreement
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School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Center for American Civics

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1. Setting The Stage: Fourth Amendment (00:00:00)

2. Colonial Roots And General Warrants (00:01:43)

3. State Constitutions And Early Text (00:03:27)

4. Probable Cause And The Warrant Process (00:03:58)

5. The Automobile Exception And Carroll (00:05:01)

6. What A Warrant Must Specify (00:07:52)

7. Reasonableness And Probable Cause Standards (00:10:06)

8. Technology, Analogy, And Home Scans (00:11:55)

9. Wiretaps, Katz, And Privacy Tests (00:13:51)