The exclusionary rule, which bars the prosecution from introducing evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches, is among the most contested features of American criminal procedure. Unlike the constitutional guarantee it enforces, the rule is not itself commanded by the constitutional text; it is a judicial creation, and courts have long disagreed about the premises that justify it. On one account, the rule is a personal remedy owed to the individual whose rights were violated: having been wronged by an unlawful search, the defendant is entitled to be restored, so far as possible, to the position he would have occupied had the violation never occurred, which requires that its fruits be suppressed. On a competing account, the rule serves no remedial function at all but exists solely to deter future misconduct by law enforcement; suppression is justified not by what is owed to the particular defendant but by its prospective effect on the behavior of police. The choice between these rationales is not merely theoretical, for each generates a different pattern of exceptions. If the rule is a personal remedy, its scope should track the scope of the violation: evidence should be suppressed whenever, and only whenever, the defendant's own rights were infringed. If, however, the rule is purely a deterrent, its application should turn on a cost-benefit calculation - suppression is warranted only where its deterrent yield exceeds the social cost of excluding reliable evidence of guilt. The modern Court has increasingly embraced the second view, and the doctrine has evolved accordingly. The good-faith exception, which admits evidence obtained under a warrant later held invalid, is unintelligible on the remedial theory, for the defendant's rights are no less violated because the officer acted in good faith; it makes sense only if the rule's purpose is to deter, and deterrence is thought pointless where the officer has done nothing culpable. This deterrence-based reconstruction, whatever its doctrinal convenience, carries a cost that its proponents rarely acknowledge. Once suppression is untethered from the vindication of individual rights and made to depend on a calculation of marginal deterrent benefit, the constitutional violation itself recedes from view; the defendant's injury becomes legally inert, relevant only insofar as excluding evidence happens to discipline the police. A right whose breach entails no remedy for the person wronged begins to look less like a right than like a general standard of official conduct, enforced at the discretion of the courts. Some defenders of the deterrence rationale welcome precisely this reframing, contending that the Fourth Amendment was always better understood as a regulatory constraint on government than as a repository of personal entitlements. Whether that contention is faithful to the amendment's origins is disputed; what is clear is that the deterrence rationale, presented as a modest refinement of remedial doctrine, in fact rests on a contestable and far-reaching theory about the nature of the right it enforces.