How your rights dissolve...
In the nineteenth century, the courts initially provided virtually absolute protection of papers held by the target of an investigation, first based solely on the Fifth Amendment's prohibition of compelled testimony and then, after Boyd v. United States, based on both the Fifth Amendment and the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. In the twentieth century, the Supreme Court reversed itself, eventually eviscerating both Fourth and Fifth Amendment limitations on subpoenas. But the early cases doing so all involved government attempts to regulate businesses; not a single one of them involved searches of personal papers, which these cases routinely indicated were still protected from government seizure by the Fifth Amendment (although no longer by the Fourth).
