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Page Number: 60.0

10 

CARPENTER v. UNITED STATES 

THOMAS, J., dissenting 

(Donahue).  Adams  agreed  that  “[p]roperty  must  be  se­
cured,  or  liberty  cannot  exist.”    Discourse  on  Davila,  in  6 
The Works of John Adams 280 (C. Adams ed. 1851).

Of  course,  the  founding  generation  understood  that,  by
securing  their  property,  the  Fourth  Amendment  would
often protect their privacy as well.  See, e.g., Boyd, supra, 
at  630  (explaining  that  searches  of  houses  invade  “the 
privacies  of  life”);  Wilkes  v.  Wood,  19  How.  St.  Tr.  1153, 
1154  (C. P.  1763)  (argument  of  counsel  contending  that
seizures  of  papers  implicate  “our  most  private  concerns”). 
But  the  Fourth  Amendment’s  attendant  protection  of 
privacy  does  not  justify  Katz’s  elevation  of  privacy  as  the 
sine  qua  non  of  the  Amendment.    See  T. Clancy,  The 
Fourth Amendment: Its History and Interpretation §3.4.4, 
p. 78  (2008)  (“[The  Katz  test]  confuse[s]  the  reasons  for 
exercising  the  protected  right  with  the  right  itself.    A 
purpose  of  exercising  one’s  Fourth  Amendment  rights 
might be the desire for privacy, but the individual’s motiva­
tion is not the right protected”); cf. United States v. Gonzalez-
Lopez,  548  U. S.  140,  145  (2006)  (rejecting  “a  line  of 
reasoning  that  ‘abstracts  from  the  right  to  its  purposes, 
and then eliminates the right’ ”).  As the majority opinion
in  Katz  recognized,  the  Fourth  Amendment  “cannot  be 
translated into a general constitutional ‘right to privacy,’ ” 
as its protections “often have nothing to do with privacy at
all.”  389 U. S., at 350.  Justice Harlan’s focus on privacy
in  his  concurrence—an  opinion  that  was  issued  between 
Griswold  v.  Connecticut,  381  U. S.  479  (1965),  and  Roe  v. 
Wade,  410  U. S.  113  (1973)—reflects  privacy’s  status  as
the organizing constitutional idea of the 1960’s and 1970’s.
The organizing constitutional idea of the founding era, by 
contrast, was property. 

C 
In  shifting  the  focus  of  the  Fourth  Amendment  from
property  to  privacy,  the  Katz  test  also  reads  the  words