Court Opinion

ID: 9843136
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 02:28:15.214699+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:14:37.739250
License: Public Domain

STEPHEN F. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the result:
I agree with the court that Tri-State had no “reasonable expectation of privacy”, and therefore no 4th Amendment claim, in the entirely open areas of the construction site. In my view, however, the contract between the State of Ohio and the general contractor (incorporated into Tri-State’s contract by reference) is not the explanation. Rather, it is the completely open character of the area involved, fully exposed to the view of the thousands of motorists who passed by the site — itself only two highway lanes wide. See United States v. Dunn, 480 U.S. 294, 107 S.Ct. 1134, 94 L.Ed.2d 326 (1987). Dunn makes reasonably clear, I think, that the “open fields” doctrine that it applied is simply a special case of the more general doctrine that a reasonable expectation of privacy is necessary for a successful 4th Amendment claim. See id. at 300, 107 S.Ct. at 1139 (invoking “open fields” doctrine and observing that the extent of the “curtilage” of a house protected by the 4th Amendment “is determined by factors that bear upon whether an individual reasonably may expect that the area in question should be treated as the home itself’). Tri-State could not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in an area that anyone driving through Cincinnati could at will peer into — and through.
I think the court implicitly concedes that this is what drives the outcome when it acknowledges, as did OSHA, that whatever rights of entry were established by the contracts did not extend to the areas concealed from “plain view”. Maj.Op. at 177. Nothing in the contracts so limits them. In fact, TriState’s objections to reliance on the contracts seem to me quite persuasive. Surely agree*179ment to inspection by A should not normally be read as a blanket abandonment of expectations of privacy against the invasions of B through Z; to say that it does is to create a rather astonishing gap in 4th Amendment protections. Further, nothing in the contract, which simply warns that the site “shall be subject to inspection of the appropriate Federal agency”, says that such inspections may occur without observance of ordinary legal norms.