Opinion ID: 1349523
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: The argument based on the common-law distinction between the curtilage of a dwelling and other land.

Text: The state and one of the dissenters below point out that, at common law, a distinction was drawn between the curtilage of a dwelling and other land. In Hester v. United States, 265 U.S. 57, 59, 44 S.Ct. 445, 446, 68 L.Ed. 898 (1924), Justice Holmes wrote: [T]he special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment to the people in their `persons, houses, papers, and effects,' is not extended to the open fields. The distinction between the latter and the house is as old as the common law. The Oliver majority also emphasized the common-law distinction: [T]he common law distinguished `open fields' from the `curtilage,' the land immediately surrounding and associated with the home. See 4 W. Blackstone, Commentaries . The distinction implies that only the curtilage, not the neighboring open fields, warrants the Fourth Amendment protections that attach to the home. At common law, the curtilage is the area to which extends the intimate activity associated with the `sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life,'    and therefore has been considered part of the home itself for Fourth Amendment purposes. Thus, courts have extended Fourth Amendment protection to the curtilage; and they have defined the curtilage, as did the common law, by reference to the factors that determine whether an individual reasonably may expect that an area immediately adjacent to the home will remain private.    Conversely, the common law implies, as we reaffirm today, that no expectation of privacy legitimately attaches to open fields. 466 U.S. at 180, 104 S.Ct. at 1742 (citations omitted; footnote omitted). [5] We question Justice Holmes' reading of this section of Blackstone's treatise. In the chapter of Blackstone's Commentaries cited by the Supreme Court, Blackstone discussed the common-law requirement that burglary take place in a dwelling, or mansion-house: [I]n the burglary of a private house: which is the most frequent,    it is indispensably necessary, to form its guilt, that it must be in a mansion or dwelling house. For no distant barn, warehouse, or the like, are under the same privileges, nor looked upon as a man's castle of defence: nor is a breaking open of houses wherein no man resides, and which therefore for the time being are not mansion-houses, attended with the same circumstances of midnight terror. A house however, wherein a man sometimes resides, and which the owner hath only left for a short season, [with the intention of returning], is the object of burglary; though no one be in it at the time of the fact committed. And if the barn, stable, or warehouse, be parcel of the mansion-house and within the same common fence, though not under the same roof or contiguous, a burglary may be committed therein; for the capital house protects and privileges all its branches and appurtenant, if within the curtilage or home-stall. 4 Blackstone, Commentaries  (footnote omitted). Thus, although the common law unquestionably recognized the concept of curtilage, it did so to enlarge the definition of a dwelling to encompass nearby structures used in conjunction with the dwelling, so that the invasion of any of them could constitute burglary. Saltzburg, supra n 2, at 15-16; see 4 Blackstone, Commentaries ; see also General Laws of Oregon 1845-1864 § 544, 535 (Deady 1865) (defining burglary as, inter alia, the breaking and entering of any building within the curtilage of any dwelling house, with intent to commit a felony therein). Moreover, as Blackstone elsewhere noted, a breaking and entering that was not a burglary might still qualify as a trespass. 4 Blackstone, Commentaries, . Neither does Blackstone's separate chapter on the tort of trespass to land distinguish between the curtilage of a dwelling and other land: Every unwarrantable entry on another's soil the law entitles a trespass by breaking his close; the words of the writ of trespass commanding the defendant to show cause quare clausum querentis fregit. For every man's land is in the eye of the law inclosed [sic] and set apart from his neighbor's: and that either by a visible and material fence, as one field is divided from another by a hedge, or by an ideal invisible boundary, existing only in the contemplation of law, as when one man's land adjoins to another's in the same field. 3 Blackstone, Commentaries - (emphasis in original). The rationale underlying the curtilage concept as it was used at common law  to provide a zone of protection to sleeping residents from the midnight terror of burglary  simply is not the same as the rationale underlying Article I, section 9, or, for that matter, the Fourth Amendment, each of which protects the privacy of the individual from warrantless invasion and scrutiny by the government and its minions. Reliance on the common-law concept of curtilage to justify excluding land outside the curtilage from the protections of either constitutional provision is misplaced.