Liquor, Law, and Liberty: How Prohibition Rewrote the Fourth Amendment

During Prohibition, legion defendants—armed with a liberal construction of the Fourth Amendment and the newly minted exclusionary rule—stormed the federal courts with challenges to the introduction of evidence obtained by the searches and seizures of federal officers. This was a period where, by all accounts, Prohibition was vastly altering American policing in lasting ways. Yet no paper has examined how federal courts facilitated that alteration.
This Thesis surveys and examines decisions, briefings, and contemporary legal commentary to uncover that much of the judiciary interpreted the Fourth Amendment during Prohibition as having a doctrinal association with the Eighteenth. Federal courts practically reconstrued the meanings of “reasonable,” “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” and “searches and seizures” to reflect the new constitutional mandate of the Eighteenth Amendment of prohibiting the traffic and manufacturing of intoxicating liquors. Revisiting the Prohibition Era search and seizure cases makes clear that their methodology and outcomes did not track public opinion as purely as previous scholarship has suggested. Instead, the Court’s decisions reflected the desire to enforce the new constitutional mandate within the statutory bounds laid out in the National Prohibition Act. The end result was not only a policing landscape that differed greatly from the rest of American history but also a Fourth Amendment landscape that exalted the home while offering second-class protections for searches and seizures occurring outside its walls—a jurisprudential legacy that lives on in the present day.