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UNITED STATES v. BALSYS

Opinion of the Court

one who contests the basic same-sovereign principle, a bur-
den that only clear, contrary, preframing common law might
carry; since the dissent starts with a broader reading of the
Clause and a less potent view of Murdock, it does not require
Murphy and the common-law cases to satisfy such a burden
before deﬁnitively ﬁnding that a more expansive principle
underlies the Clause.

IV

There remains, at least on the face of the Murphy majori-
ty’s opinion, a further invitation to revise the principle of
the Clause from what Murdock recognized. The Murphy
majority opens its discussion with a catalog of “Policies of
the Privilege,” 378 U. S., at 55 (citations and internal quota-
tion marks omitted):

“It reﬂects many of our fundamental values and most
noble aspirations: our unwillingness to subject those
suspected of crime to the cruel trilemma of self-
accusation, perjury or contempt; our preference for an
accusatorial rather than an inquisitorial system of crimi-
nal justice; our fear that self-incriminating statements
will be elicited by inhumane treatment and abuses; our
sense of fair play which dictates a fair state-individual
balance by requiring the government to leave the indi-
vidual alone until good cause is shown for disturbing him
and by requiring the government in its contest with the
individual to shoulder the entire load; our respect for the
inviolability of the human personality and of the right of
each individual to a private enclave where he may lead
a private life, our distrust of self-deprecatory state-
ments; and our realization that the privilege, while
sometimes a shelter to the guilty, is often a protection
to the innocent.”

Some of the policies listed would seem to point no further
than domestic arrangements and so raise no basis for any
privilege looking beyond fear of domestic prosecution. Oth-