Opinion ID: 1349523
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The textual argument.

Text: The state argues that, because Article I, section 9, like the Fourth Amendment, expressly protects persons, houses, papers and effects, the state provision should be interpreted the same way that the United States Supreme Court has interpreted the Fourth Amendment. That argument has some obvious validity, because the language of a constitutional provision must have some meaning if it is to be interpreted in any principled manner. On the other hand, Article I, section 9, has acquired a meaning over the years that is hard to reconcile with the literal interpretation advocated by the state. Our prior decisions establish that Article I, section 9, does not protect property alone; in a broader sense, it also protects an individual's privacy interest, which we have defined as an interest in freedom from certain forms of governmental scrutiny. State v. Campbell, supra, 306 Or. at 170, 759 P.2d 1040. In Campbell, the police used a radio transmitter to monitor the movements of the defendant's automobile as it travelled on public streets. The police did not search the automobile itself, or any other effect of the defendant, but this court nevertheless held that the use of the transmitter was a search under Article I, section 9, because: [I]f the state's position in this case is correct, no movement, no location and no conversation in a `public place' would in any measure be secure from the prying of the government. There would in addition be no ready means for individuals to ascertain when they were being scrutinized and when they were not. That is nothing short of a staggering limitation upon personal freedom. We could not be faithful to the principles underlying Article I, section 9, and conclude that such forms of surveillance were not searches. Id. at 172, 759 P.2d 1040. Similarly, a literal interpretation of Article I, section 9, would afford no protection from such things as the police interception of a private telephone conversation from a public telephone booth. As the dissent in Oliver pointed out, even a literalist United States Supreme Court has not been that literal: [n]either a public telephone booth nor a conversation conducted therein can fairly be described as a person, house, paper, or effect; yet we have held that the Fourth Amendment forbids the police without a warrant to eavesdrop on such a conversation. Oliver v. United States, supra, 466 U.S. at 185, 104 S.Ct. at 1745 (Marshall, J., dissenting) (footnote omitted) (citing Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967)). There is a second problem with the literal interpretation proposed by the state. If we were to rely on the language of Article I, section 9, to limit its protection to persons, papers, houses, and effects [ i.e., personal property], that interpretation necessarily would exclude all kinds of real property except houses. There would be no principled way to distinguish, based on the language itself, office buildings, churches, schools, commercial establishments, and the like, from other kinds of real property. [3] The drafters of Article I, section 9, are unlikely to have intended to exclude from its protections all real property except houses, i.e., structures where people customarily reside. The scope of the section is broader than a literal reading of its terms. [4] We conclude that we cannot rely on a literal reading of Article I, section 9. To hold that the provision applies only to those items specifically enumerated therein would undermine the rationale that we have identified as the touchstone of Article I, section 9  the right to be free from intrusive forms of government scrutiny  and would open up prior decisions of this court, such as State v. Campbell, supra , to serious question. We decline to take that step. Article I, section 9, protects the privacy of the individual from certain kinds of governmental scrutiny. If the individual has a privacy interest in land outside the curtilage of his dwelling, that privacy interest will not go unprotected simply because of its location.