The Trespass Doctrine and the Privacy Doctrine Comparison in Defining Fourth Amendment Searches
The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. The searches definition has two major approaches: the trespass doctrine focused on protection of private places against physical intrusion, and the privacy doctrine protecting people’s privacy.
The trespass doctrine refers to a property-based approach adopted by the Supreme Court at the first era of modern Fourth Amendment thinking that implied an emphasis of the right of property. This interpretation may be illustrated by Olmstead v. United States case. In the case, an issue was to determine whether an electronic wiretap that contained conversations of a conspiracy to import alcohol that was prohibited by law could be used as an evidence. The court applied the trespass doctrine emphasizing that electronic eavesdropping did not violate the property rights and did not impact a person, home, paper or effect as stated in the Fourth Amendment.
The privacy doctrine, in its turn, is focused on protecting people, not places. This approach was adopted after Katz v. United States case with issue of a wiretap of a suspect involved in illegal gambling from a public payphone. The privacy doctrine gave broader interpretation of privacy protection that implied what a person seeks to preserve as private, even in public area, may be protected by the Fourth Amendment. It established a twofold requirement for determining the area of protection when a person exhibited privacy expectation and this expectation may be recognized as reasonable. In Katz case the doctrine was applied as follows: as Katz entered a public telephone booth, closed the door and paid for telephone services, his right to keep his conversation private is constitutionally protected.
To summarize, the trespass doctrine interprets the Fourth Amendment as protection against unreasonable searches as involving physical intrusion in places protected by the privacy rights. The privacy doctrine is focused on protection people, not places, implying the actions performed in public places under the reasonable expectation of a person to keep them private may be the subject of protection under the Fourth …
