Court Opinion

ID: 9639262
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 16:09:53.230939+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:14.798919
License: Public Domain

FRANK, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I add a few words only because I think it important to underscore our rejection of the following argument on which the Assistant United States Attorney chiefly relied: Whenever the government validly regulates any business and includes in its regulation a valid requirement that records be kept which shall be open to official inspection, then refusal to produce the records for such inspection authorizes the officers to enter the premises and seize the records. One variant of the argument was that refusal to permit inspection in such circumstances constitutes, in effect, the legal equivalent of consent to enter; another variant was that, in such circumstances, conduct of the defendant must be interpreted as consent to entry although, in other circumstances, the very same conduct would be regarded as refusal. In one way or another, the Assistant United States Attorney urged that obstruction of the right of the officers to inspect deprived the defendant of his usual privilege to be free of unreasonable search and seizure.
Even of those who regard with disfavor the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination,1 there are few who do not agree that freedom from unreasonable search is one of the basic, indispensable, privileges of our democratic system of government. Were the Assistant United States Attorney’s contention correct, then that privilege would vanish in large segments of American life. For it is fairly obvious that in the future many businesses will be subject to governmental inspection under constitutionally valid statutes. The complications of our modern industrial era make such inspection often socially desirable, despite its irksomeness. To augment such irksomeness by coupling it, as the Assistant United States Attorney would like, with the loss of a fundamental constitutional right would be to b.uild up popular resistance to needed governmental action. Fortunately, his argument is wholly unsupported in authority or reason.

 I do not happen to share that view.