William J. Cuddihy's history of the Fourth Amendment is to search and seizure what the Iliad is to Greek literature. Epic in scope, Cuddihy's work traces debates over the searching of houses, persons, and effects from 602 to 1791, showing how governmental searches evolved in the English and American contexts, and how such searches engendered intense political responses. Composed of twenty-four chapters loosely organized into six parts, Cuddihy begins with the emergence of the concept of search and seizure in the years prior to 1642, discusses the emergence of the general and specific warrant from 1642 to 1760, then moves to the various reasons why American colonists, and later the Founders saw fit to include an amendment dedicated to restricting search and seizure in the U.S. Constitution.

Structured more like a reference work than a standard narrative history, each chapter opens with a table of contents, thesis statement, and brief synopsis. Rather than detract from the whole, however, such features make the work's otherwise daunting 900 plus pages manageable, particularly for readers interested in one particular time period, or one particular subject. For scholars interested in current debates, Cuddihy includes an afterward challenging Akhil Reed Amar's thesis that standards of reasonableness and not warrants dominated the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Though standards of reasonableness governed during the medieval period, Cuddihy argues, “warrantless searches diminished rapidly after the English Reformation,” as both specific and general warrants proliferated (774). By the time of the Founding, “warrants enjoyed the overriding mandate of established usage,” a reality that Amar apparently misses, presumably because it was not mentioned in cases or statutes (776).

Though written for the expert, Cuddihy's work boasts much that will likely be of interest to the generalist as well. For example, Cuddihy does an excellent job of tracing the relationship between resistance to government searches and notions of what we today would call privacy. Prior to 1642, for example, Cuddihy shows that “protecting the King's peace” was significantly more important than preserving individual privacy (19) and that even in the American colonies “promiscuous” searches were “routine aspects of colonial life” (232). By 1787, however, Cuddihy maintains that American colonists had begun to chafe at British practices, linking state searches with invasions of “bed chambers” and “private concerns” (678–79). Not only did such concerns foreshadow the Supreme Court's discussion of privacy almost two hundred years later in Griswold, (suggesting that the right may not have been quite so penumbral after all), but Cuddihy's research also recovers an intriguing gender component to Founding era notions of when searches had gone too far. To take just a few examples, Cuddihy shows how colonists framed unreasonable searches in terms of government agents violating “the most delicate part of our families,” “the petticoats of the fair sex,” and “the covers” of “beloved mates” (678–79). Though it would be hard to argue that Cuddihy should have written more on any given topic, his observations indicate that a gendered analysis of early conceptions of privacy might be worthwhile.

Finally, Cuddihy does a nice job of picking up on Leonard Levy's approach to reading constitutional politics through individual amendments. Here, the Fourth Amendment emerges not simply as a moat around citizens' castles, but a poison pill introduced by Anti-Federalists like Patrick Henry Lee “to extinguish the new government” (699). Joining Rakove, Cuddihy posits that only the “masterful” strategy of men like James Madison saved the amendment, particularly as proponents of the Constitution realized that concessions were necessary to steal the “Antifederalist thunder” (707). All of this goes to show, Cuddihy concludes, that “political self-interest was indispensable to understanding the Bill of Rights and its component Fourth Amendment” (725).