Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616 (1886) was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in which the Court held that "a search and seizure [was] equivalent [to] a compulsory production of a man's private papers" and that the search was "an 'unreasonable search and seizure' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment."

Background

Thirty-five cases of plate glass were seized at the Port of New York for not paying import duties. To prove the case, the government compelled E.A. Boyd & Sons to produce their invoice from the Union Plate Glass Company of Liverpool, England. Boyd complied but claimed the order was a form of self-incrimination.

Decision

In the published opinion, after citing Lord Camden's judgment in Entick v Carrington, 19 How. St. Tr. 1029, Justice Bradley said (630): "The principles laid down in this opinion affect the very essence of constitutional liberty and security. They reach farther than the concrete form of the case then before the court, with its adventitious circumstances; they apply to all invasions on the part of the government and its employees of the sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life. It is not the breaking of his doors and the rummaging of his drawers that constitutes the essence of the offense; but it is the invasion of his indefeasible right of personal security, personal liberty, and private property, where that right has never been forfeited by his conviction of some public offense, it is the invasion of this sacred right which underlies and constitutes the essence of Lord Camden's judgment." Although not expressly overruled, some aspects of the Supreme Court's opinion in Boyd have been limited or negated by subsequent Supreme Court decisions. For example, in the case of Fisher v. United States in 1976, the Supreme Court stated: