The Writs of Assistance Case

The Writs of Assistance Case, by M.H. Smith reconstructs the legal and political struggle surrounding the writs of assistance—broad search warrants used by British customs officers in colonial America. Drawing on extensive archival research in Britain and the United States, M.H. Smith traces the origins of these writs from seventeenth-century English customs law to their controversial enforcement in Massachusetts in 1761. The case, famously remembered through John Adams’s recollections, mar...