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Reasonable Expectation of Privacy The Fourth Amendment protects the people against unreasonable searches and seizures. The test for what's unreasonable is the "reasonable expectation of privacy": if a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in an item or a dwelling to be searched, the search will be considered unreasonable (and thus, unconstitutional) unless a warrant is obtained. This category contains excerpts from various court opinions that shed light on this issue. Pages: ‹1› ‹2› ‹3› ‹4› ‹5› ‹6›
To the extent there was any "anomaly" in our prior jurisprudence, the Court has "cured" it at the expense of creating a more serious paradox. For surely it is anomalous to prohibit a search of a briefcase while the owner is carrying it exposed on a public street yet to permit a search once the owner has placed the briefcase in the locked trunk of his car. [...] Under the Court's holding today, the privacy interest that protects the contents of a suitcase or a briefcase from a warrantless search when it is in public view simply vanishes when its owner climbs into a taxicab.
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It is well established that an individual has but a limited expectation of privacy in the interior of his car. [...] In contrast, it is equally well established that an individual has a heightened expectation of privacy in the contents of a closed container. [...] Because an individual's expectation of privacy in a container is distinct from, and far greater than, his expectation of privacy in the interior of his car, it follows that an individual's consent to a search of the interior of his car cannot necessarily be understood as extending to containers in the car.
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Many children, like many adults, engage in dangerous activities on their own time; that the children are enrolled in school scarcely allows government to monitor all such activities. If a student has a reasonable subjective expectation of privacy in the personal items she brings to school, surely she has a similar expectation regarding the chemical composition of her urine.
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Scrutiny of another's trash is contrary to commonly accepted notions of civilized behavior. I suspect, therefore, that members of our society will be shocked to learn that the Court, the ultimate guarantor of liberty, deems unreasonable our expectation that the aspects of our private lives that are concealed safely in a trash bag will not become public.
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A trash bag, like any of the above-mentioned containers, "is a common repository for one's personal effects" and, even more than many of them, is "therefore . . . inevitably associated with the expectation of privacy." [...] It cannot be doubted that a sealed trash bag harbors telling evidence of the "intimate activity associated with the 'sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life,'" which the Fourth Amendment is designed to protect.
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