Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf
Page Number: 61

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

11 

THOMAS, J., dissenting 

“persons,  houses,  papers,  and  effects”  out  of  the  text.    At 
its broadest formulation, the Katz test would find a search 
“wherever an individual may harbor a reasonable ‘expecta­
tion of privacy.’ ”  Terry, 392 U. S., at 9 (emphasis added). 
The  Court  today,  for  example,  does  not  ask  whether  cell-
site  location  records  are  “persons,  houses,  papers,  [or] 
effects”  within  the  meaning  of  the  Fourth  Amendment.8 
Yet  “persons,  houses,  papers,  and  effects”  cannot  mean
“anywhere”  or  “anything.”  Katz’s  catchphrase  that  “the
Fourth  Amendment  protects  people,  not  places,”  is  not  a 
serious  attempt  to  reconcile  the  constitutional  text.    See 
Carter,  525  U. S.,  at  98,  n. 3  (opinion  of  Scalia,  J.).    The 
Fourth Amendment obviously protects people; “[t]he ques­
tion  . . .  is  what  protection  it  affords  to  those  people.” 
Katz,  389  U. S.,  at  361  (Harlan,  J.,  concurring).  The 
Founders decided to protect the people from unreasonable
searches  and  seizures  of  four  specific  things—persons,
houses,  papers,  and  effects.    They  identified  those  four
categories  as  “the  objects  of  privacy  protection  to  which
the  Constitution  would  extend,  leaving  further  expansion
to  the  good  judgment  . . .  of  the  people  through  their  rep­
resentatives  in  the  legislature.”  Carter,  supra,  at  97–98 
(opinion of Scalia, J.). 

This  limiting  language  was  important  to  the  founders.
Madison’s  first  draft  of  the  Fourth  Amendment  used  a 
different phrase: “their persons, their houses, their papers,
and  their  other  property.”  1  Annals  of  Cong.  452  (1789) 

—————— 

8 The  answer  to  that  question  is  not  obvious.    Cell-site  location  rec­
ords  are  business  records  that  mechanically  collect  the  interactions 
between  a  person’s  cell  phone  and  the  company’s  towers;  they  are  not 
private  papers  and  do  not  reveal  the  contents  of  any  communications. 
Cf.  Schnapper,  Unreasonable  Searches  and  Seizures  of  Papers,  71  Va. 
L. Rev.  869,  923–924  (1985)  (explaining  that  business  records  that  do 
not  reveal  “personal  or  speech-related  confidences”  might  not  satisfy
the original meaning of “papers”).