Albright v. Oliver, 510 U.S. 266, 41 (1994)

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306

ALBRIGHT v. OLIVER

Stevens, J., dissenting

tion whether Fourth Amendment protects against filing of charges without probable cause).

At bottom, the plurality opinion seems to rest on one fundamental misunderstanding: that the incorporation cases have somehow "substituted" the specific provisions of the Bill of Rights for the "more generalized language contained in the earlier cases construing the Fourteenth Amendment." Ante, at 273. In fact, the incorporation cases themselves rely on the very "generalized language" The Chief Justice would have them displacing.25 Those cases add to the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause most of the specific guarantees of the first eight Amendments, but they do not purport to take anything away; that a liberty interest is not the subject of an incorporated provision of the Bill of Rights does not remove it from the ambit of the Due Process Clause. I cannot improve on Justice Harlan's statement of this settled proposition:

"[T]he full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This 'liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreason-25 See, e. g., Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U. S. 643, 655 (1961) (applying the exclusionary rule to the States because "without that rule the freedom from state invasions of privacy would be so ephemeral . . . as not to merit this Court's high regard as a freedom 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty' "); Benton v. Maryland, 395 U. S. 784, 794 (1969) (holding that "the double jeopardy prohibition of the Fifth Amendment represents a fundamental ideal in our constitutional heritage, and that it should apply to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment"); Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U. S. 145, 149 (1968) ("Because we believe that trial by jury in criminal cases is fundamental to the American scheme of justice, we hold that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees a right of jury trial in all criminal cases which—were they to be tried in a federal court—would come within the Sixth Amendment's guarantee").

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