Bill of Rights: the Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment answers a colonial grievance about the open-ended search papers, called writs of assistance, that James Otis argued against in 1761. John Adams later said American independence began in the Boston court room where Otis spoke. The text demands probable cause and a warrant that names the place to be searched and the things to be seized. The printing used here comes from the first volume of the United States Statutes at Large.

Where this text comes fromIts structure is worth noticing before you type it: one sentence, split by a single semicolon into two halves that do entirely different jobs. The first half states a right and names what it covers. The second half sets the only condition under which that right may be set aside, and it does so by describing what a piece of paper must contain rather than what an officer may believe. That is an unusual way to write a protection. Most rights of the period are phrased as prohibitions on government; this one is phrased as a specification for a document.

What you might not noticeThe four things protected are named as persons, houses, papers, and effects. That list was written for a world of physical objects, and every argument about searching anything else has had to work outwards from those four words. Source

What it trainsOne capital letter in the entire passage, at the very beginning, and after it the Shift key is never needed again: on the US layout the nine commas, the single semicolon and the full stop all sit unshifted. That works out at roughly every sixth word closing a clause across fifty-four words, and the danger is the opposite of the Constitution passages here. Nothing forces you to slow down, so people speed up and start dropping the marks entirely. Two words tie for longest at twelve letters, unreasonable and particularly, and they sit at opposite ends of the sentence, so the hardest spelling arrives twice with the whole clause chain in between.

Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource