Now, one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house.

James Otis Jr. (1725–1783), a Massachusetts lawyer and political pamphleteer, became famous for his 1761 courtroom argument against the British government’s “writs of assistance”—broad search warrants used by customs officials to enter homes and businesses in pursuit of smuggled goods. In that controversy, Otis framed the security of the home against arbitrary entry as a core element of “English liberty,” drawing on common-law ideas that a person’s house is a protected refuge. The line is associated with Otis’s anti–writs of assistance stance, a formative episode in pre-Revolutionary resistance that later influenced American constitutional thinking about unreasonable searches and seizures.

Otis is asserting that liberty is not only a matter of abstract political rights but also of concrete protections in everyday life—especially the right to be secure in one’s dwelling. By calling the “freedom of one’s house” an essential branch of English liberty, he links private domestic space to public constitutional order: if officials can enter at will, then law becomes mere force and citizens live under intimidation. The statement anticipates later Anglo-American legal principles that treat the home as a special zone of privacy and security, and it helps explain why opposition to general warrants became a rallying point for broader arguments about limits on governmental power.