Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf
Page Number: 36.0

Cite as:  585 U. S. ____ (2018) 

9 

KENNEDY, J., dissenting 

from  the  law  of  property,  individuals  often  have  greater 
expectations of privacy in things and places that belong to
them, not to others.  And second, the Fourth Amendment’s 
protections  must  remain  tethered  to  the  text  of  that
Amendment,  which,  again,  protects  only  a  person’s  own
“persons, houses, papers, and effects.” 

Katz  did  not  abandon  reliance  on  property-based  con-
cepts.  The Court in Katz analogized the phone booth used 
in that case to a friend’s apartment, a taxicab, and a hotel 
room.  389  U. S.,  at  352,  359.    So  when  the  defendant 
“shu[t]  the  door  behind  him”  and  “pa[id]  the  toll,”  id.,  at 
352, he had a temporary interest in the space and a legit-
imate  expectation  that  others  would  not  intrude,  much
like the interest a hotel guest has in a hotel room, Stoner 
v.  California,  376  U. S.  483  (1964),  or  an  overnight  guest 
has  in  a  host’s  home,  Minnesota  v.  Olson,  495  U. S.  91 
(1990).  The  Government  intruded  on  that  space  when  it 
attached a listening device to the phone booth.  Katz, 389 
U. S.,  at  348.  (And  even  so,  the Court  made  it  clear  that 
the  Government’s  search  could  have  been  reasonable  had 
there  been  judicial  approval  on  a  case-specific  basis, 
which, of course, did occur here.  Id., at 357359.) 

Miller  and  Smith  set  forth  an  important  and  necessary 
limitation  on  the  Katz  framework.    They  rest  upon  the 
commonsense  principle  that  the  absence  of  property  law 
analogues can be dispositive of privacy expectations.  The 
defendants in those cases could expect that the third-party
businesses  could  use  the  records  the  companies  collected,
stored,  and  classified  as  their  own  for  any  number  of 
business  and  commercial  purposes.    The  businesses  were 
not  bailees  or  custodians  of  the  records,  with  a  duty  to
hold  the  records  for  the  defendants’  use.    The  defendants 
could  make  no  argument  that  the  records  were  their  own
papers  or  effects.  See  Miller,  supra,  at  440  (“the  docu-
ments  subpoenaed  here  are  not  respondent’s  ‘private
papers’ ”);  Smith,  supra,  at  741  (“petitioner  obviously