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Page Number: 75.0

4 

CARPENTER v. UNITED STATES 

ALITO, J., dissenting 

poena  duces  tecum  is  awarded  when  the  Defendant  has 
confessed by his Answer that he hath such Writings in his 
Hands  as  are  prayed  by  the  Bill  to  be  discovered  or 
brought into Court”).

Second,  although  this  new  species  of  subpoena  had  its
origins in the Court of Chancery, it soon made an appear-
ance  in  the  work  of  the  common-law  courts  as  well.    One 
court later reported that “[t]he Courts of Common law . . . 
employed the same or similar means . . . from the time of
Charles the Second at  least.”  Amey v.  Long,  9 East. 473, 
484, 103 Eng. Rep. 653, 658 (K. B. 1808). 

By the time Blackstone published his Commentaries on 
the  Laws  of  England  in  the  1760’s,  the  use  of  subpoenas 
duces tecum had bled over substantially from the courts of 
equity to the common-law courts.  Admittedly, the transi-
tion  was  still  incomplete:  In  the  context  of  jury  trials,  for 
example,  Blackstone  complained  about  “the  want  of  a 
compulsive  power  for  the  production  of  books  and  papers 
belonging  to  the  parties.”  Blackstone  381;  see  also,  e.g., 
Entick  v.  Carrington,  19  State  Trials  1029,  1073  (K. B.
1765) (“I wish some cases had been shewn, where the law 
forceth  evidence  out  of  the  owner’s  custody  by  process. 
[But]  where  the  adversary  has  by  force  or  fraud  got  pos-
session of your own proper evidence, there is no way to get 
it  back  but  by  action”).    But  Blackstone  found  some  com-
fort  in  the  fact  that  at  least  those  documents  “[i]n  the
hands  of  third  persons  . . .  can  generally  be  obtained  by 
rule  of  court,  or  by  adding  a  clause  of  requisition  to  the
writ  of  subpoena,  which  is  then  called  a  subpoena  duces 
tecum.”    Blackstone  381;  see  also,  e.g.,  Leeds  v.  Cook,  4 
Esp. 256, 257, 170 Eng. Rep. 711 (N. P. 1803) (third-party 
subpoena duces tecum); Rex v. Babb, 3 T. R. 579, 580, 100 
Eng.  Rep.  743,  744  (K. B.  1790)  (third-party  document
production).  One  of  the  primary  questions  outstanding,
then,  was  whether  common-law  courts  would  remedy  the 
“defect[s]”  identified  by  the  Commentaries,  and  allow