the persons or things to be seized.
These few words have been much argued over the years and have produced a large body of case law and Supreme Court decisions defining the nature of the search situation, the need for a warrant in different situations, and the ability to use or not use evidence seized wrongly by officials. Privacy issues intersect with the Constitution in several different aspects, though there is no specific right of privacy enumerated in the Constitution. Cases involving the Fourth Amendment may deal with guards against physical and electronic snooping by the police, and whether privacy in this context can be justified by "original intent" has been a controversy. This is the sort of case to be considered below--we know that the Fourth Amendment applies to physical searches in a domicile, but does it also protect conversations over the telephone so that government wiretaps require a warrant?
The essence of the doctrine of original intent is explained in a speech by Justice Brennan (1985):
In its most doctrinaire incarnation, this view demands that Justices discern exactly what the Framers thought about the question under consideration and simply follow that intention in resolving the case before them (Brennan, 1985, 4).
However, Brennan would modify this approach somewhat and describes this approach as one that "feigns self-effacing deference to the specific judgments" (Brennan, 1985, 4) of the Framers. Bork (1987), on the other hand, not merely explains original intent but insists that it is the only legitimate basis for making decisions based on the Constitution, and he further explains what intentionalism means:
It is not the notion that judges may apply a constitutional provision only to circumstances specifically contemplated by the framers. In so narrow a form the philosophy is useless. Since we cannot know how the framers would vote on specific cases today, in a very different world from...