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Cite as: 524 U. S. 666 (1998)

693

Opinion of the Court

the framing 14 and reﬁned through immunity doctrine in the
intervening years. Since the Judiciary could not recognize
fear of foreign prosecution and at the same time preserve
the Government’s existing rights to seek testimony in ex-
change for immunity (because domestic courts could not
enforce the immunity abroad), it follows that extending pro-
tection as Balsys requests would change the balance of pri-
vate and governmental interests that has seemingly been
accepted for as long as there has been Fifth Amendment
doctrine. The upshot is that accepting personal testimo-
nial integrity or privacy as a prima facie justiﬁcation for
the development Balsys seeks would threaten a signiﬁcant
change in the scope of traditional domestic protection; to the
extent, on the other hand, that the domestic tradition is
thought worthy of preservation, an appeal to a general per-
sonal testimonial integrity or privacy is not helpful. See
Doe v. United States, 487 U. S. 201, 213, n. 11 (1988) (ﬁnding
no violation of the privilege “[d]espite the impact upon the
inviolability of the human personality”); Schmerber v. Cali-
fornia, 384 U. S. 757, 762 (1966) (holding that a witness can-
not rely on the privilege to decline to provide blood samples);
ibid. (“[T]he privilege has never been given the full scope
which the values that it helps to protect suggest”).

B

Murphy’s policy catalog would provide support, at a rather
more concrete level, for Balsys’s argument that application
of the privilege in situations like his would promote the pur-
pose of preventing government overreaching, which on any-
one’s view lies at the core of the Clause’s purposes. This
argument begins with the premise that “cooperative inter-
nationalism” creates new incentives for the Government to
facilitate foreign criminal prosecutions. Because crime, like
legitimate trade, is increasingly international, a correspond-

14 See n. 13, supra.