Abstract

During Prohibition, legion defendants—armed with a liberal construction of the Fourth Amendment and the newly minted exclusionary rule—stormed the federal courts with challenges to the introduction of evidence obtained by the searches and seizures of federal officers. This was a period where, by all accounts, Prohibition was vastly altering American policing in lasting ways. Yet little study has been given to how federal courts facilitated that alteration. 

This Article surveys and examines decisions, briefings, and contemporary legal commentary and uncovers that much of the judiciary interpreted the Fourth Amendment during Prohibition as having a doctrinal association with the Eighteenth. Federal courts practically reconstrued the meanings of “reasonable,” “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” and “searches and seizures” to adjust to the realities wrought by the new constitutional mandate of the Eighteenth Amendment to prohibit “intoxicating liquors.” At the same time, decisions frequently reflected a desire to enforce national prohibition within the particular statutory bounds of the National Prohibition Act. The result was not only a policing landscape that differed greatly from preceding American history but also a Fourth Amendment landscape that exalted the home while offering second-class protections for searches and seizures occurring outside its walls—a jurisprudential legacy that lives on in the present day.

Keywords

Prohibition, Fourth Amendment, Search and Seizure, Eighteenth Amendment, Reasonableness, National Prohibition Act, Constitutional Law