The petitioner, John William Stanford, Jr., operated a mail-order book business, "All Points of View", out of his private residence in San Antonio, Texas.

Many of the seized books had been, in fact, intended for sale in Stanford's home business and included "such diverse writers as Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodore Draper, Fidel Castro, Earl Browder, Pope John XXIII, and Mr. Justice Hugo Black.

Such a warrant required only the reasonable belief of wrongdoing, and granted law enforcement officials considerable leeway in what they were allowed to seize as evidence of a crime.

Justice Steward focuses closely on the English Court of King’s Bench case Entick v Carrington (1765), which rejected a search warrant against a bookseller for seditious libel.

[5] Calling Lord Camden’s opinion the “wellspring” of the Fourth Amendment,[6] Justice Steward draws the King’s overreach there in close parallel with Texas’s search of John Stanford here.

[7] Near the end of the Court's opinion, it summarizes its purpose in discussing history at such length: In short, what this history indispensably teaches is that the constitutional requirement that warrants must particularly describe the 'things to be seized' is to be accorded the most scrupulous exactitude when the 'things' are books, and the basis for their seizure is the ideas which they contain.The magistrate's order was vacated, and the case was remanded to lower court for its final disposition, consistent with the ruling above.