Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 736.0

524US2

Unit: $U97

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

691

Opinion of the Court

ers, however, might suggest a concern broad enough to en-
compass foreign prosecutions and accordingly to support a
more expansive theory of the privilege than the Murdock
understanding would allow.

The adoption of any such revised theory would, however,
necessarily rest on Murphy’s reading of preconstitutional
common-law cases as support for (or at least as opening the
door to) the expansive view of the Framers’ intent, which
we and the commentators since Murphy have found to be
unsupported. Once the Murphy majority’s treatment of the
English cases is rejected as an indication of the meaning in-
tended for the Clause, Murdock must be seen as precedent
at odds with Balsys’s claim. That precedent aside, however,
we think there would be sound reasons to stop short of rest-
ing an expansion of the Clause’s scope on the highly general
statements of policy expressed in the foregoing quotation
from Murphy. While its list does indeed catalog aspirations
furthered by the Clause, its discussion does not even purport
to weigh the host of competing policy concerns that would be
raised in a legitimate reconsideration of the Clause’s scope.

A

The most general of Murphy’s policy items ostensibly sug-
gesting protection as comprehensive as that sought by
Balsys is listed in the opinion as “the inviolability of the
human personality and . . . the right of each individual to a
private enclave where he may lead a private life.”
378 U. S.,
at 55 (internal quotation marks omitted). Whatever else
those terms might cover, protection of personal inviolability
and the privacy of a testimonial enclave would necessarily
seem to include protection against the Government’s very
intrusion through involuntary interrogation.12
If in fact

12 We are assuming, arguendo, that the intrusion is a subject of the
Clause’s protection. See Murphy, 378 U. S., at 57, n. 6; Gecas, 120 F. 3d,
at 1462 (Birch, J., dissenting); cf. United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494
U. S. 259, 264 (1990) (“The privilege against self-incrimination guaranteed