If you know why you should read about John Wilkes, you may skip this paragraph. If you think that John Wilkes shot Abraham Lincoln, you may not. If you think a violent street mob cannot contribute to civil liberty or that a nobleman in a carriage drawn by four horses cannot be part of a protest march this story may surprise you. If you think that sexual politics is a modern invention, you may learn something here. If you think newspapers always have been free to report what goes on in government, you need this book. If you think the founding fathers of America had no support from England, this is required reading. If you believe dirty books should be burned, pause to think before you continue. If you think that blue-collar workers should not be allowed to vote, this book is not for you. If you think the police have the right to arrest forty-nine people when they are looking for three, shut it now. If you think that people should be imprisoned for writing essays against the government, I have nothing to say to you.
A biography from 2006, released in paperback about two months ago, hopefully will be a significant contribution to the understanding of the people who created our national desire for the Bill of Rights. The plaintiff in Wilkes v. Wood, 19 Howell’s St. Tr. 1153, 98 Eng. Rep. 489 (K.B. 1763), was John Wilkes, the subject of Arthur H. Cash’s, John Wilkes, The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty. Wilkes never came to America, but he was a force in the creation of the Bill of Rights. Wilkes v. Wood then Entick v Carrington, 19 Howell’s St. Tr. 1029, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (K.B. 1765), are discussed in § 1:4 of the treatise:
Just after the litigation over the writs of assistance in the Massachusetts Bay colony was resolved, back in England, John Wilkes, a member of Parliament, anonymously published North Briton, a series of pamphlets criticizing the policies of the British government. In 1763, one pamphlet was unusually critical, and the government decided to prosecute him for sedition. Lord Halifax, the Secretary of State, issued a general warrant to four messengers to “search for the authors, printers, and publishers of seditious and treasonable paper.” “Under this ‘roving commission,’ they proceeded to arrest upon suspicion no less than forty-nine persons in three days, even taking them from their beds in the middle of the night.” The actual printer was arrested, and he snitched on Wilkes. Wilkes was waiting for the King’s messengers, and he refused to submit to the warrant. The messengers forcibly removed Wilkes, and then they searched his house.
Wilkes sued one Wood, the undersecretary who supervised the execution of the warrant. Chief Justice Pratt held that the warrant was illegal “as totally subversive of the liberty [and] the person and property of every man in this kingdom.” Wilkes thus obtained a judgment for damages, and it was affirmed on appeal.
Before the warrant for Wilkes’ papers was ever issued, Lord Halifax issued a warrant for John Entick to seize all his papers. When Entick saw Wilkes’ success, he sued, and he too obtained a verdict. The case came before the Court of Common Pleas, and Judge Pratt, now known as Lord Camden, was presiding. [Entick v. Carrington.]
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"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced."
—Williams
v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold,
J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws,
or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp
v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that
bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the
police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater
than it is today."
— Terry
v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their
property."
—Entick
v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have
frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And
so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his
case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth
Amendment."
—United
States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated
here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth."
—Chapman
v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the
bottom of a turntable."
—Arizona
v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly
exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth
Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in
an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."
—Katz
v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to
protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born
to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men
of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
—United
States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted
intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by
government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose
it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.”
—United
States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need." —Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Let it Bleed (album, 1969)
"In Germany, they first came for the communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for
the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came
for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration
camp]
“You know, most men would get discouraged by now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!” ---Pepé Le Pew
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime." —Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)
The book was dedicated in the first (1982) and sixth (2025) editions to Justin William Hall (1975-2025). He was three when this project started in 1978.
