The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 407, 415 (1819).

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U.S. Const. amend. I.

77 

See Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 352 (1967).

78 

394 U.S. 557 (1969).

79 

See Stanley, 394 U.S. at 564–8; 

ibid.

, at 569–72 (Stewart, J., concurring in the result).

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Osborne v. Ohio, 495 U.S. 103, 108–10 (1990).

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Laurence H. Tribe

nowhere mentioned in the Constitution’s text – was part of the connective tis-

sue that linked the First Amendment’s underlying purposes and postulates to 

those of the Fourth.

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So too with government information-gathering that could not, by any lin-

guistic stretch, be seen as entailing conduct within the ambit of the Fourth 

Amendment’s restraints on “searches and seizures,” even as that notion was 

expanded in Katz.

Consider, for instance, wide-ranging and deeply probing background inves-

tigations into, and interrogations of, individuals seeking various government 

benefits, like employment with NASA.

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 The issue presented in such cases is 

not the legitimacy of giving a broader definition to constitutional terms reach-

ing us from centuries earlier – as with stretching the terms “search” and “sei-

zure” to encompass high-tech variants (for example, electronic surveillance 

or, as in Kyllo v. United States in 2001, thermal imaging enabling government 

to “see” through the walls of a private home)

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 unimaginable when the words 

were first used in the Constitution.

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 The issue is rather the legitimacy of draw-

ing lines to link disparate constitutional provisions like the First and Fourth 

Amendments, as the Court implicitly did in Katz, in order to treat forms of 

government intrusion into personal control over private information as poten-

tially outlawed by the Constitution, even though clearly beyond the reach of 

any particular prohibition.

Specifically, the puzzle in cases like NASA v. Nelson

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 in 2011 is whether to 

treat the Constitution’s verbal isolation of several distinct points (like the First 

and Fourth Amendments) along a broader spectrum that implicates the same 

general set of values (there, values of “informational privacy”)

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 as though the 

silence between those points represents a negation of any constitutional right 

81 

See Stanley, 394 U.S. at 560, 565–6. And yet, as recently as August 2016, the Eleventh Circuit 

upheld a municipal ordinance banning the sale or rental of sex toys against a Fourteenth 

Amendment challenge made by a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis who sought to use 

sex toys to “facilitate intimacy” with her husband and by an artist who used sexual devices in 

his artwork. Flanigan’s Enterprises, Inc. of Georgia v. City of Sandy Springs, No. 14-15499, 2016 

WL 4088731, at *1–*2 (11th Cir. Aug. 2, 2016). Although the case didn’t involve prosecuting 

mere private possession and use – and thus the court had no occasion to compare or contrast 

Stanley – it makes little sense to limit Stanley’s logic to protect one’s right to create and use a 

sex toy at home, but not one’s right to acquire such a toy elsewhere.

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E.g., NASA v. Nelson, 562 U.S. 134, 140–2 (2011).

83 

Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001).

84 

See 

ibid.

, at 31–2; see also Lawrence Lessig, “Fidelity in Translation” (1993) 71 Tex. L. Rev. 1165.

85 

562 U.S. 134 (2011).

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