Court Opinion

ID: 9428430
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:23:47.109968+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:13.388391
License: Public Domain

Justice Stewart,
dissenting.
In Frank v. Maryland, 359 U. S. 360, the Court concluded that warrantless administrative inspections are not subject to the restrictions that the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments place upon conventional searches. The Frank decision was overruled eight years later in Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U. S. 523, over the dissent of three Members of the Court, of whom I was one. I believed then that the Frank case had been correctly decided, and that warrantless health and safety inspections do not “requir[e] . . . the safeguards necessary for a search of evidence of criminal acts.” Frank, supra, at 372 (dissenting opinion).1
I must, nonetheless, accept the law as it is, and the law is now established that administrative inspections are searches within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. As such, warrantless administrative inspections of private property without consent, are, like other searches, constitutionally invalid except in a few precisely defined circumstances. Camara, supra, at 528-529. This principle was re-emphasized most recently in Marshall v. Barlow’s, Inc., 436 U. S. 307, a case in which the Court carefully and explicitly defined the scope of the exception to the general rule of Camara: a search warrant is required for administrative inspections ex*610cept in those businesses with “a long tradition of close government supervision, of which any person who chooses to enter such a business must already be aware.” 436 U. S., at 313. Because the Court today departs far from this principle, I respectfully dissent.
A
In Camara, the Court announced the general rule that a warrantless inspection of a private dwelling by municipal administrative officers without proper consent is unconstitutional “unless it has been authorized by a valid search warrant.” 387 U. S., at 528-529. In the companion case, See v. City of Seattle, 387 U. S. 541, the Court held that the general rule of Camara applies also to administrative inspections of commercial premises.
Until today, exceptions to the general rule have been found in only two cases. In Colonnade Catering Corp. v. United States, 397 U. S. 72, the Court upheld against constitutional attack a statute that authorized warrantless searches of a liquor licensee’s premises by Internal Revenue agents. And in United States v. Biswell, 406 U. S. 311, the Court held that federal Treasury agents could search the premises of a licensed gun dealer to determine whether he was in compliance with the Gun Control Act.
In Marshall v. Barlow’s, Inc., supra, the Court made clear that Colonnade and Biswell were only limited exceptions to the general rule of Camara, and that they did not signal a trend away from that rule. The Court stated that “unless some recognized exception to the warrant requirement applies,” warrants for administrative inspections are mandatory. 436 U. S., at 313.
The Barlow’s Court could not have been more clear in its explanation for and description of the Colonnade-Biswell exception: “The element that distinguishes these enterprises from ordinary businesses is a long tradition of close government supervision, of which any person who chooses to enter such a business must be aware.” 436 U. S., at 313 (emphasis *611added). The rationale for the exception was unmistakably that of implied consent. The Court reasoned that “*[t]he businessman [in an industry with a long tradition of close government supervision] in effect consents to the restrictions placed upon him.' ”2 (quoting Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, 413 U. S. 266, 271).
Thus, as explained in Barlow’s, the Colonnade-Biswell exception is a single and narrow one: the exception applies to businesses that are both pervasively regulated and have a long history of regulation. Today the Court conveniently discards the latter portion of the exception.3 Yet the very *612rationale for the exception — that the “businessman ... in effect consents to the restrictions placed upon him” — disappears without it. It can hardly be said that a businessman consents to restrictions on his business when those restrictions are not imposed until after he has entered the business. Yet, because it does not overrule Barlow’s, that is precisely what the Court says today to many stone quarry operators.4
Under the peculiar logic of today’s opinion, the scope of the Fourth Amendment diminishes as the power of governmental regulation increases. Yet I would have supposed that the mandates of the Fourth Amendment demand heightened, not lowered, respect, as the intrusive regulatory authority of government expands.
B
Because Barlow’s states that the Colonnade-Biswell exception applies only when business is both pervasively regulated and has a long tradition of regulation, it follows that the exception does not apply to stone quarries, and that the Fourth Amendment requires that an inspection that is not consented to can be made only under the authority of a search warrant.5 *613Although quarries have existed at least since the beginning of the Republic, the District Court properly noted that it was only in 1966, when Congress added them to the scope of the Mine Safety and Health Act, that they became pervasively regulated. 493 F. Supp. 963, 965-966.
As I read today’s opinion, Congress is left free to avoid the Fourth Amendment industry by industry even though the Court held in Barlow’s that Congress could not avoid that Amendment all at once.6 Congress after today can de*614fine any industry as dangerous, regulate it substantially, and provide for warrantless inspections of its members. But, because I do not believe that Congress can, by legislative fiat, rob the members of any industry of their constitutional protection, I dissent from the opinion and judgment of the Court.

 This is not to say that evidence of criminality seized in the course of a warrantless administrative inspection should not be excluded at a criminal trial.

 In Barlow’s, consent could not be found for inspections of the premises of the myriad businesses regulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The Court was unmoved by the Government’s claims that warrantless inspections were necessary for effective enforcement, and that warrants would impose serious burdens upon the inspection system and the courts. 436 U. S., at 316-320. And the Court found similarly unpersuasive the Secretary of Labor’s argument that a warrant requirement for OSHA inspections would mean that “as a practical matter, warrantless-search provisions in other regulatory statutes are also constitutionally infirm,” id., at 321.

 The Court’s recasting of what the Court said in Barlow’s is remarkable. After discussing Colonnade and Biswell, it states that those decisions create an exception to the warrant requirement when “Congress has reasonably determined that warrantless searches are necessary to further a regulatory scheme and the federal regulatory presence is sufficiently comprehensive and defined that the owner of commercial property cannot help but be aware that his property will be subject to'periodic inspections undertaken for specific purposes.” Ante, at 600. It then says that “this” exception to the warrant requirement was re-emphasized in Barlow’s. Ante, at 600.
Nothing of the sort was re-emphasized in Barlow’s. Rather, the Court re-emphasized that “[t]he element that distinguishes these enterprises from ordinary businesses is a long tradition of close government supervision, of which any person who chooses to enter such a business must ... be aware.” 436 U. S., at 313.
The Court today does not, to be sure, rid its reinterpretation of Colonnade and Biswell of all traces of implied consent. It says that under its new test, “the owner . . . cannot help but be aware that his property will be subject to periodic inspections for specific purposes.” Ante, at 600. But, as the Court must realize, this purported limitation is meaning*612less. The Court never explains how operators of stone quarries could possibly be aware that the quarries would be subject to warrantless inspections until Congress told them they would be.

 The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit correctly rejected the notion that the pervasiveness of regulation alone is enough to vitiate a quarry operator’s reasonable expectation of privacy: “It would be far more accurate to state that [the] legislation and regulations . . . 'entered’ [the operator’s] business activity” than to state that the operator “subject [ed] himself to governmental supervision and regulation.” Marshall v. Wait, 628 F. 2d 1255, 1259.

 Warrants are issued 'ex parte. If a warrant were sought after a mine operator’s refusal to permit inspection, the time of execution of the warrant would not have to be made known to the operator. Barlow’s, 436 U. S., at 320. And when it was anticipated that consent would not be given for a search, a warrant could be issued in accordance with an administrative plan based on specific neutral criteria in advance of the *613planned inspection. The Court’s expressed fear that the obtaining of a warrant would give advance notice to a quarry operator of a forthcoming inspection is thus groundless.
Contrary to the Court’s expressed belief today, ante, at 604-605, a warrant would not be an empty gesture, but would assure the quarry operator of the authority for the search and advise him of its scope and objectives. A warrant protects the proprietor’s privacy interests by assuring him that a neutral judicial officer has reviewed the decision to inspect and found it “reasonable under the Constitution, . . . authorized by statute, and [made] pursuant to an administrative plan containing specific neutral criteria.” Barlow’s, 436 U. S., at 323. On the other hand, war-rantless inspections will allow inspectors "almost unbridled discretion ... as to when to search and whom to search,” ibid., precisely the type of arbitrary government interference with privacy that, it has been held in this context, the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. Camara, 387 U. S., at 528; See v. City of Seattle, 387 U. S. 541, 545.

Factually, Barlow’s and this case are nearly identical. Both cases arose when a business proprietor refused entry to a federal inspector who had come to conduct a warrantless health and safety inspection of business premises. In both cases, warrantless inspections were authorized by statute, § 8 (a) of the Occupational Health and Safety Act in Barlow’s and § 103 (a) of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977 in this case. Both statutes were similarly intended to improve health and safety standards in the Nation’s workplaces, and their language is unmistakably parallel. Compare 29 U. S. C. § 651 et seq. with 30 U. S. C. § 801 et seq. (1976 ed., Supp. III).
Moreover, Barlow’s cannot be distinguished from this case because MSHA relates to a specific industry, whereas the Occupational Safety and Health Act sought to regulate a far broader range of workplaces. MSHA, like the Occupational Safety and Health Act, relates to many different industries with widely disparate characteristics and occupational injury *614rates. Limestone quarries, sand and gravel operations, surface operations, and various noncoal underground mines are all quite distinct, and cannot be equivalent for constitutional purposes to underground coal mines. The Court today does not so much as mention the voluminous materials submitted by appellees and amici that show this to be true.