674
Opinion of the Court
apparently providing a witness with the right against compelled self-incrimination when reasonably fearing prosecution by the government whose power the Clause limits, but not otherwise. Since there is no helpful legislative history,5 and because there was no different common law practice at the time of the framing, see Part III-C, infra; cf. Counselman v. Hitchcock, 142 U. S. 547, 563-564 (1892) (listing a sample of cases, including preframing cases, in which the privilege was asserted, none of which involve fear of foreign prosecution), there is no reason to disregard the contextual reading. This Court's precedent has indeed adopted that so-called same-sovereign interpretation.
A
The currently received understanding of the Bill of Rights as instituted "to curtail and restrict the general powers granted to the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Branches" of the National Government defined in the original constitutional articles, New York Times Co. v. United
5 See Gecas, 120 F. 3d, at 1435 (noting that the Clause has "virtually no legislative history"); 5 The Founders' Constitution 262 (P. Kurland & R. Lerner eds. 1987) (indicating that the Clause as originally drafted and introduced in the First Congress lacked the phrase "any criminal case," which was added at the behest of Representative Lawrence on the ground that the Clause would otherwise be "in some degree contrary to laws passed").
In recent years, scholarly attention has refined our knowledge of the previous manifestations of the privilege against self-incrimination, the present culmination of such scholarship being R. Helmholz et al., The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination (1997). What we know of the circumstances surrounding the adoption of the Fifth Amendment, however, gives no indication that the Framers had any sense of a privilege more comprehensive than common law practice then revealed. See Moglen, Taking the Fifth: Reconsidering the Origins of the Constitutional Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, 92 Mich. L. Rev. 1086, 1123 (1994) ("[T]he legislative history of the Fifth Amendment adds little to our understanding of the history of the privilege"). As to the common law practice, see Part III-C, infra.
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