general warrant
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 379 U.S. 476 - Stanford v. Texas · 1965Most cited · 1,807 citing opinions
The requirement that warrants shall particularly describe the things to be seized makes general searches under them impossible and prevents the seizure of one thing under a warrant describing another. As to what is to be taken, nothing is left to the discretion of the officer executing the warrant.
How often courts cite the case defining “general warrant”
Court decisions citing the opinion that defined “general warrant” — 1,807 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining case as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.