Court Opinion

ID: 9428428
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:23:47.105213+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:13.384613
License: Public Domain

Justice Stevens,
concurring.
Like Justice Stewart, I believe the Court erred in Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U. S. 523, when it overruled Frank v. *607Maryland, 359 U. S. 360. See post, at 609 (dissenting opinion). I also share Justice Stewart’s conviction that each of us has a duty to accept the law as it is; disagreement with the holding in a prior case is not a sufficient reason for refusing to honor it.1 Unlike him, however, I also think the Court erred in Marshall v. Barlow’s, Inc., 436 U. S. 307, when it concluded that Camara required it to invalidate the safety inspection program authorized by Congress in the Occupational Safety and Health Act. As I explained in my dissent in that case, neither the longevity of a regulatory program nor a businessman’s implied consent to regulations imposed by the Federal Government determines the reasonableness of a congressional judgment that the public interest in occupational health or safety justifies a program of warrantless inspections of commercial premises. See 436 U. S., at 336-339 (Stevens, J., dissenting).
Justice Stewart has cogently demonstrated that the rationale of today’s decision is much closer to the reasoning in my dissent than to the reasoning in the majority opinion in Barlow’s, Inc. Nevertheless, I am not persuaded that the holding in Barlow’s, Inc., requires the Court to invalidate the program of mine inspections authorized by the statute we construe today.2 I accept the Court’s explanation of the differences between the scope of these statutes as sufficient to support a different result in this case. Because I agree with today’s majority that the cases are distinguishable, I need not confront the more difficult question whether Camara represented such a fundamental misreading of the Fourth Amendment that it should be overruled. I would merely observe that that option is more viable today than when some of the *608reasoning that would support it could only be found in dissenting opinions, see 387 U. S., at 546-555 (Clark, J., dissenting); 436 U. S., at 325-339 (Stevens, J., dissenting), or in the earlier Court opinion in Frank that had itself been overruled in Camara.

See Florida Dept. of Health & Rehabilitative Services v. Florida Nursing Home Assn., 450 U. S. 147, 151 (Stevens, J., concurring).

I do not agree with Justice Stewart’s view that the doctrine of stare decisis requires that we respect dictum unnecessary to the decision in Barlow’s, Inc. Cf. McDaniel v. Sanchez, ante, p. 154 (Stewart, J., dissenting).