In Search of Common Sense: A Lingustic Approach to Fourth Amendment Law

Professor Cunningham was the winner of the 1988 Scholarly Paper Competition sponsored by the Association of American Law Schools. The following article is an abridged version of that winning paper, adapted from a transcript of his presentation to the 1988 AALS Annual Meeting. His thesis is that semantic analysis of "common sense" meanings of the word "search" can provide and approach to interpreteing the scope of the Fourth Amendment which is both faithful to the text and flexible enough to meet the demands of changing times. In a much longer article appearing in 73 Iowa Law Review No. 3 (March 1988) he supports his "common sense approach" with a detailed analysis of the amendment's legislative history and its relation toe pre-Revolutionary events and , picking up where this paper ends, applies the semantic analysis to the Supreme Court's major cases of the last 20 years which have interpreted the scope of the Fourth Amendment.