Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution in the context of "Probable cause"

The right to property, or the right to own property (cf. ownership), is often classified as a human right for natural persons regarding their private property. The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is credited as a significant precedent for the legal protection of individual property rights.

A right to property is specified in Article 17 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it is not recognised in the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The 1950 European Convention on Human Rights acknowledges a right for a natural or legal person to "peaceful enjoyment of his possessions", subject to the "general interest or to secure the payment of taxes."

A fair trial is a trial which is "conducted fairly, justly, and with procedural regularity by an impartial judge". Various rights associated with a fair trial are explicitly proclaimed in Article 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and Article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights, in addition to numerous other constitutions and declarations throughout the world. There is no binding international law that defines what is not a fair trial; for example, the right to a jury trial and other important procedures vary from nation to nation.

The Judiciary Act of 1789 (ch. 20, 1 Stat. 73) is a United States federal statute enacted on September 24, 1789, during the first session of the First United States Congress. It established the federal judiciary of the United States. Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution prescribed that the "judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and such inferior Courts" as Congress saw fit to establish. It made no provision for the composition or procedures of any of the courts, leaving this to Congress to decide.

The existence of a separate federal judiciary was controversial during the debates over the ratification of the Constitution. Anti-Federalists had denounced the judicial power as a potential instrument of national tyranny. Indeed, of the ten amendments that eventually became the Bill of Rights, five (the fourth through the eighth) dealt primarily with judicial proceedings. Even after ratification, some opponents of a strong judiciary urged that the federal court system be limited to only a Supreme Court and, perhaps, local admiralty judges. Congress, however, decided to establish a system of federal trial courts with broader jurisdiction, thereby creating an arm for enforcement of national laws within each state.

Berger v. New York, 388 U.S. 41 (1967), was a United States Supreme Court decision invalidating a New York law under the Fourth Amendment, because the statute authorized electronic eavesdropping without required procedural safeguards.

The first Red Scare was a period during the early 20th-century history of the United States marked by a widespread fear of far-left movements, including Bolshevism and anarchism, due to real and imagined events; real events included the Russian 1917 October Revolution, German Revolution of 1918–1919, and anarchist bombings in the U.S. At its height in 1919–1920, concerns over the effects of radical political agitation in American society and the alleged spread of socialism, communism, and anarchism in the American labor movement fueled a general sense of concern.

The scare had its origins in the hyper-nationalism of World War I as well as the Russian Revolution. At the war's end, following the October Revolution, American authorities saw the threat of communist revolution in the actions of organized labor, including such disparate cases as the Seattle General Strike and the Boston Police Strike and then in the bombing campaign directed by anarchist groups at political and business leaders. Fueled by labor unrest and the anarchist bombings, and then spurred on by the Palmer Raids and attempts by United States Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to suppress radical organizations, it was characterized by exaggerated rhetoric, illegal searches and seizures, unwarranted arrests and detentions, and the deportation of several hundred suspected radicals and anarchists. In addition, the growing anti-immigration nativist movement among Americans viewed increasing immigration from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe as a threat to American political and social stability.

Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court redefined what constitutes a "search" or "seizure" with regard to the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The ruling expanded the Fourth Amendment's protections from an individual's "persons, houses, papers, and effects," as specified in the Constitution's text, to include any areas where a person has a "reasonable expectation of privacy." The reasonable expectation of privacy standard, now known as the Katz test, was formulated in a concurring opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan II.

The Katz test has since been used in numerous cases, particularly because of technological advances that create new questions about privacy norms and government surveillance of personal data.