Tom Davies
Davies Delves into Constitutional History
While participating “of counsel” in a 1990 Supreme Court search case, Illinois v. Rodriguez, Tom Davies became convinced that the U.S. Supreme Court was misinterpreting the original constitutional standards for searches and arrests.
After roughly a decade of research in the historical sources themselves—rather than what the Supreme Court or other historians had written on the topic—Davies published a 1999 Michigan Law Review article in which he documented that the Fourth Amendment had never been meant to create a flexible reasonableness standard for all searches and arrests. Rather, the amendment was simply meant to ban the use of unspecific “general warrants,” and the phrase “unreasonable searches and seizures” in the amendment was a pejorative label for grossly illegal searches under general warrants.
Although Davies’ interpretation was contrary to the conventional history that appears in Supreme Court opinions as well as a variety of other commentaries, his 1999 article, “Recovering the Original Fourth Amendment,” for which he was awarded a UT Chancellor’s Research Citation, has come to be viewed as a leading commentary on Fourth Amendment history.
To read the rest of Professor Davies' story, please see the Fall 2009 issue of Tennessee Law Magazine.