Hugo Black

“ The Fourth Amendment was aimed directly at the abhorred practice of breaking in, ransacking and searching homes and other buildings and seizing people's personal belongings without warrants issued by magistrates. The Amendment deserves, and this Court has given it, a liberal construction in order to protect against warrantless searches of buildings and seizures of tangible personal effects. But until today this Court has refused to say that eavesdropping comes within the ambit of Fourth Amendment restrictions. See, e.g., Olmstead v. ”

“ While my reading of the Olmstead and Goldman cases convinces me that they were decided on the basis of the inapplicability of the wording of the Fourth Amendment to eavesdropping, and not on any trespass basis, this is not to say that unauthorized intrusion has not played an important role in search and seizure cases. This Court has adopted an exclusionary rule to bar evidence obtained by means of such intrusions. As I made clear in my dissenting opinion in Berger v. ”

“ It has been insisted only that the electronic device not be planted by an unlawful physical invasion of a constitutionally protected area. Silverman v. United States.'
To support its new interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, which in effect amounts to a rewriting of the language, the Court's opinion concludes that 'the underpinnings of Olmstead and Goldman have been * * * eroded by our subsequent decisions * * *.' But the only cases cited as accomplishing this 'eroding' are Silverman v. ”