| Increasingly, public school teachers and administrators are concerned about the security and, ultimately, the privacy of their papers. Specifically, teachers and administrators who keep anecdotal notes, personal reflections related to events that occur in the course of their jobs in diaries or journals, want to know if such papers are considered private papers. If so, can the individual who created them can be compelled to produce those papers in criminal court proceedings.; Under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, citizens of the United States are guaranteed the right against unlawful search and seizure, and the right not to incriminate one's self. However, “(e)ven if one believes that some precepts in the Constitution are essentially rulelike, fairly mechanically applicable, it is quite clear that almost everything of significance in the Constitution has not clear meaning” (Kelman, 1987, p. 157).; Legal research and analysis was used to seek out precedent setting court cases involving the terms search and seizure coupled with private papers. Since no court cases have dealt directly with private papers of teachers, cases involving business papers were used to predict what could happen if a court compelled the production of a school official's private papers.; The view of the Court has dramatically changed since the adoption of the Fourth Amendment. In the late nineteenth century, the Supreme Court declared papers searches to be illegal, but since the 1960s, the Supreme Court has redefined the privacy rights of individuals in their voluntarily produced papers in criminal court cases. Recently, the Supreme Court has declared that the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination does not extend to the contents of any voluntarily prepared document whether business or personal (U.S. v. John Doe III at 93). |
