Cite as: 585 U. S. ____ (2018)
5
Opinion of the Court
mage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of criminal activity.” Riley v. California, 573 U. S.
___, ___ (2014) (slip op., at 27). In fact, as John Adams
recalled, the patriot James Otis’s 1761 speech condemning
writs of assistance was “the first act of opposition to the
arbitrary claims of Great Britain” and helped spark the
Revolution itself. Id., at ___–___ (slip op., at 27–28) (quoting 10 Works of John Adams 248 (C. Adams ed. 1856)).
For much of our history, Fourth Amendment search
doctrine was “tied to common-law trespass” and focused on
whether the Government “obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area.”
United States v. Jones, 565 U. S. 400, 405, 406, n. 3 (2012).
More recently, the Court has recognized that “property
rights are not the sole measure of Fourth Amendment
violations.” Soldal v. Cook County, 506 U. S. 56, 64
(1992). In Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347, 351 (1967),
we established that “the Fourth Amendment protects
people, not places,” and expanded our conception of the
Amendment to protect certain expectations of privacy as
well. When an individual “seeks to preserve something as
private,” and his expectation of privacy is “one that society
is prepared to recognize as reasonable,” we have held that
official intrusion into that private sphere generally qualifies as a search and requires a warrant supported by
probable cause. Smith, 442 U. S., at 740 (internal quotation marks and alterations omitted).
Although no single rubric definitively resolves which
expectations of privacy are entitled to protection,1 the
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1 JUSTICE KENNEDY believes that there is such a rubric—the “property-based concepts” that Katz purported to move beyond. Post, at 3
(dissenting opinion). But while property rights are often informative,
our cases by no means suggest that such an interest is “fundamental”
or “dispositive” in determining which expectations of privacy are
legitimate. Post, at 8–9. JUSTICE THOMAS (and to a large extent
JUSTICE GORSUCH) would have us abandon Katz and return to an