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(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Scott Skinner-Thompson, University of Colorado Boulder

(THE CONVERSATION) Almost all American adults including parents, medical patients and people who are sexually active regularly exercise their right to privacy, even if they dont know it.

Privacy is not specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. But for half a century until its June 24, 2022, ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson the Supreme Court has recognized it as an outgrowth of protections for individual liberty. As I have studied in my research on constitutional privacy rights, this implied right to privacy is the source of many of the nations most cherished, contentious and commonly used rights including the right to have an abortion.

A key component of liberty

The Supreme Court first formally identified what is called decisional privacy the right to independently control the most personal aspects of our lives and our bodies in 1965, saying it was implied from other explicit constitutional rights.

For instance, the First Amendment rights of speech and assembly allow people to privately decide what theyll say, and with whom theyll associate. The Fourth Amendment limits government intrusion into peoples private property, documents and belongings.

Relying on these explicit provisions, the court concluded in Griswold v. Connecticut that people have privacy rights preventing the government from forbidding married couples from using contraception.

In short order, the court clarified its understanding of the constitutional origins of privacy. In the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to have an abortion, the court held that the right of decisional privacy is based in the Constitutions assurance that people cannot be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law. That phrase, called the due process clause, appears twice in the Constitution in the Fifth and 14th Amendments.

Decisional privacy also provided the basis for other decisions protecting many crucial, and everyday, activities.

The right to privacy protects the ability to have consensual sex without being sent to jail. And privacy buttresses the ability to marry regardless of race or gender.

The right to privacy is also key to a persons ability to keep their family together without undue government interference. For example, in 1977, the court relied on the right to private family life to rule that a grandmother could move her grandchildren into her home to raise them even though it violated a local zoning ordinance.

Under a combination of privacy and liberty rights, the Supreme Court has also protected a persons freedom in medical decision-making. For example, in 1990, the court concluded that a competent person has a constitutionally protected liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical treatment.

Limiting government disclosure

The right to decisional privacy is not the only constitutionally protected form of privacy. As then-Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist noted in 1977, the concept of privacy can be a coat of many colors, and quite differing kinds of rights to privacy have been recognized in the law.

This includes what is called a right to informational privacy letting a person limit government disclosure of information about them.

According to some authority, the right extends even to prominent public and political figures. In one key decision, in 1977, Chief Justice Warren Burger and Rehnquist both conservative justices suggested in dissenting opinions that former President Richard Nixon had a privacy interest in documents made during his presidency that touched on his personal life. Lower courts have relied on the right of informational privacy to limit the governments ability to disclose someones sexual orientation or HIV status.

All told, though the word isnt in the Constitution, privacy is the foundation of many constitutional protections for our most important, sensitive and intimate activities. If the right to privacy is eroded such as in a future Supreme Court decision many of the rights its connected with may also be in danger.

This story was updated on June 24, 2022, to reflect the Supreme Courts decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/privacy-isnt-in-the-constitution-but-its-everywhere-in-constitutional-law-183204.

Licenced as Creative Commons - attribution, no derivatives.

Here is the original post:
Privacy isn't in the Constitution but it's everywhere in constitutional law - Journal Inquirer

June 24, 2022

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Of all the absurdities that we accept without question, basing the right to own an AR15 on the Second Amendment is the most brazenly far-fetched.

The man who gunned down those nineteen children and two educators at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 24 of this year was not acting in concert with a well-regulated militia. He was acting as a madman inspired by an evil impulse to slaughter innocent children. And the police who answered the call waited outside for an hour, afraid to go in unwilling to risk their lives to an insane man armed with a modern killing machine.

We need to ask ourselves some common sense questions:

Heres a practical analogy regarding changing times:

In the early days of our nation, people traveled overland by horse-drawn carriages. There was no regulatory entity issuing licenses. The roads were not too crowded and drivers generally managed to avoid accidents. With the invention and refinement of the automobile, the roads became more congested and dangerous. Rules of the road were codified and drivers were required to apply for licensure based on knowledge and competence.

Similarly pragmatic reasoning must be applied to guns. The front-loading musket of Revolutionary War days is not equivalent to an AR15. It is not a gun in the Fourth Amendment sense of the word. No such mass-murder machine was even dreamed of in the days of our forefathers. And the murderer of the Uvalde children was not a member of a well-regulated militia. He was a madman with an AR15.

I am not recommending more stringent licensing for AR15s. We as citizens do not need these weapons. Their proliferation is neither dictated nor endorsed by the Second Amendment. The only real beneficiaries of their continued public sale are members of the gun industry.

When will the next mass shooting be? And why must it be? We can end this.

Excerpt from:
Uvalde and the Second Amendment - Daily Kos

Photograph Source: Gerald L. Nino, CBP, U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security Public Domain

In 2017, when I was interviewing people at Customs and Border Protection headquarters in Washington, DC, one official told me point-black, Were exempted from the Fourth Amendment. The Border Patrol, according to him, can circumvent the Constitution and conduct unwarranted searches and seizures. I suppose I didnt hide my look of surprise too well (he said it so authoritatively and casually!), because the officer immediately followed that up with a quick the Supreme Court ruled that many decades ago.

On June 8, the U.S. Supreme Court again validated this exemption and strengthened it. In Egbert v. Boule the court ruled to protect federal agents, particularly Border Patrol agents, from civil rights lawsuits (by making it much more difficult to do so). Central to the case was a Fourth Amendment claim. U.S. Border Patrol agent Erik Egbert entered innkeeper Robert Boules property in Blaine, Washington, without a warrant to check the immigration status of some recently arrived guests. When Boule protested Egberts presence, Egbert threw him against a vehicle and then to the ground. In its ruling in favor of Egbert, the Supreme Court wrote that regulating the conduct of agents at the border has national security implications, and that there would be a risk in undermining border security.

As SCOTUSblog contributing writer Howard Wasserman told NPR, Considerations of national security and foreign affairs that are endemic to immigration enforcement and immigration issues are always going to make it improper for a damages action to go forward. As has been the case since 9/11, the broad yet ill-defined notion of national security trumps all else.

But there is a longer history to this, as the CBP official alluded to at the beginning. Geographer Reece Jones, author of the forthcoming Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States, told me that this was the latest example of the continued evisceration of Fourth Amendment protections. The Supreme Court had previously ruled that Border Patrol agents needed lower standards of evidence to stop vehicles, could operate permanent checkpoints deep inside the U.S., and could use racial profiling in all of their work. Now, even when citizens are subjected to egregious abuses of authority, there is no mechanism to hold Border Patrol agents accountable.

I Feel Like I Have No Civil Rights

Read more here:
How a Supreme Court Ruling Impacts the Tohono O'odham Nation - CounterPunch

Anti-American congressional members, of both parties, have proven again that they are the people the Founding Fathers warned us against.

Specifically, the proposed bribing of states to arbitrarily strip citizens Second Amendment rights also obliterates the due process clause and the Fourth Amendment.

Concerned parents are officially labeled domestic terrorists for exercising their First Amendment rights through speaking against school boards, so its no stretch to believe Second Amendment rights will be stripped for opposing other leftist agenda items.

One can easily expect to see similar bribes for illegal alien sanctuary, fully-centralized zoning laws, radical education policies, voting rules, forced unionization, etc. Noncompliance will strip federal taxpayer funds.

These Democrats and RINOs wont stop until they achieve absolute power over all Americans. They state their efforts are just an important first step. When will patriotic Americans start taking these authoritarians at their word and hold them fully accountable for their intentional destruction of our constitutional republic?

Steve Bristol

Clinton

Read more from the original source:
Letter to the editor: Gun measures are 'anti-American' - New Haven Register

LaGrange Police Illegally Arrest Grandmother Over Phone

Police claim they dont need a warrant to seize property

The City of Lagrange is looking at a potential lawsuit after officers with the LaGrange Police Department arrested local nursing assistant Sharatha Dozier when she exercised Fourth Amendment rights by requesting a warrant before she would turn her mobile phone over to the officers.

The incident occurred on Sunday, June 12, when Dozier, a 47-year-old black woman, went to the LaGrange Police Department to check on her grandson. While waiting for information, officers gave her an iPhone taken from her grandson when hed been arrested. Soon, the police officers told Dozier to turn the phone back over to them, threatening to arrest her for obstruction of justice if she refused. Thats when Dozier took out her other phone and started broadcasting the encounter on social media.

Ms. Dozier didnt break into police headquarters and steal evidence. The phone wasnt locked up in some evidence locker, They gave it to her. Then, because she had the audacity to exercise her rights, they locked her up, said Doziers attorney, Harry Daniels. Thats not the way it works, otherwise none of us would be safe.

Police are there to protect and serve no to bully and steal.

On the video, seen by more than 8,000 viewers on Facebook Live, Dozier can be clearly heard telling officers the she is not refusing to turn over the phone, but simply asking officers to follow the law which requires a warrant.

Im not being detained. I havent committed any crime at all, Dozier says on the video. Im not refusing to give yall the phone. Lets just do it the right way. Get a warrant. Thats all Im saying.

Claiming they didnt need a warrant, officers then tried to prevent Dozier from leaving the police department by threatening to arrest her if she did.

After further discussion in which Dozier made it clear that she needed to leave and go to work, the officers walked Dozier to exit while repeating their threats and, as soon as she walked through the door, placed her under arrest injuring her wrist in the process.

Click to HERE to view the video.

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LaGrange Police Illegally Arrest Grandmother Over Phone [Video] - atlantadailyworld