Making Sense of Search and Seizure Law: A Fourth Amendment Handbook, Second Edition

Making Sense of Search and Seizure Law: A Fourth Amendment Handbook is the best one volume treatment of Fourth Amendment law in print. Competing works are sprawling, and often multi-volume, encyclopedic treatments of the subject. This book is easy to follow and makes sense of the subject in a way that readers can quickly grasp. The primary purpose of the book is to restate existing up-to-date Fourth Amendment law, as announced by the over 430 U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the subject, in an organized and lucid manner, true to its historical origins.

The book is divided into two parts: Part I, The Historical Background and Purpose of the Fourth Amendment; and Part II, The Substantive Law of the Fourth Amendment. Part I contains 6 chapters, including an in-depth discussion of the historical background that led to the adoption of the Fourth Amendment [1761-1791] not the cursory historical treatment usually found in competing works. These chapters show how this historical background has heavily influenced the development of Fourth Amendment case law, as well as how central the Fourth Amendment is to our country's development and traditions. Part II has an introductory chapter on constitutional construction, and is then divided into three subparts covering 10 chapters: Subpart A, The Standing Requirement; Subpart B, The Unreasonableness Requirement; and Subpart C, Enforcement of the Fourth Amendment.

Making Sense of Search and Seizure Law is designed for practicing lawyers and judges for use in their professional work, as well as law professors who teach Fourth Amendment law and wish to place a copy or multiple copies of the book on reserve as outside reading for their students. The general reader should also find it of interest particularly the historical chapters.

The 2017 supplement is available on Carolina Academic Press' website, cap-press.com, free of charge.