Privacy and the Growing Plight of the Homeless: Reconsidering the Values Underlying the Fourth Amendment

This Comment will discuss the issue that the Supreme Court of Connecticut declined to decide in Mooney: the Fourth Amendment\u27s inadequate protection of homeless individuals\u27 privacy in their living spaces or homes. Part II will trace the evolution of Fourth Amendment doctrine from its beginnings in 1886 with Boyd v. United States, when privacy was intimately intertwined with private property, through the Warren Court\u27s 1967 decisions in Katz v. United States and Warden, Maryland Penitentiary v. Hayden, which declared that the principal object of the Fourth Amendment is the protection of privacy rather than property, and [we] have increasingly discarded fictional and procedural barriers rested on property concepts. Part III will explore how the subsequent Burger and Rehnquist Courts have dismantled the Warren Court\u27s privacy analysis, quickly returning us to the pre-Katz era and once again placing the emphasis of the Fourth Amendment on property. Specifically, this section will address how the present Court has returned us to property concepts through their skewed application of Harlan\u27s two-prong reasonable expectation test, and will then focus on the present Court\u27s narrow interpretation of the word house in the text of the Constitution. Finally, Part IV will discuss a Fourth Amendment test that is based on privacy instead of property. Additionally, this section will discuss Hegel\u27s personality theory of property and its present uses and manifestations in American law