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524US2

Unit: $U97

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710

UNITED STATES v. BALSYS

Breyer, J., dissenting

Again, where is Murphy’s error?

Stated in this minimal way, Murphy’s historical analysis is
difﬁcult to attack. One can, of course, always point to spe-
cial features of a case and thereby distinguish it.
In respect
to the mid-18th-century English cases, one can point out that
Calcutta and the church may not have been completely sepa-
rate “sovereigns.” Ante, at 685. And Saline Bank might
have involved application by the federal court of a state law
that, without the help of the Fifth Amendment, protected a
party from self-incrimination. But see Saline Bank, supra,
at 103 (citing Virginia privilege statute which, by its terms,
applied to suit by the state “Attorney General” in the state
“Superior Court of Chancery for the district of Richmond”
for recovery of a bank’s capital stock “in behalf of the Com-
monwealth”). But this kind of criticism is beside the point.
The English judges made no point of the former. See ante,
at 685 (statements about the privilege in these cases were
“unqualiﬁed”).
It does not denigrate their learning to sug-
gest that they did not articulate the precise sovereignty-
related status of ecclesiastical courts or of Calcutta’s criminal
law in 1749. Nor did Justice Holmes make any point of the
latter. See Ballmann v. Fagin, supra, at 195. As for the
suggestion that it is illegitimate to consider the later English
authorities in construing the privilege, see ante, at 687, one
would think that, on this view, Murdock is at least as vulner-
able as Murphy.

Most importantly, neither the majority today, nor the au-
thorities it cites, see ante, at 688–689, n. 11, shows that the
key historical points upon which Murphy relied are clearly
wrong. At worst, Murphy represents one possible reading
of a history that is itself unclear. Murphy’s main criticisms
Its reading of earlier
of Murdock are reasonable ones.
cases, insofar as they were relevant to its criticism of Mur-
dock, was plausible then, see Grant, Federalism and Self-
Incrimination, 4 UCLA L. Rev. 549, 562 (1957) (Murdock
“illustrates the danger of copying one’s precedents directly