William J. Brennan

“ California, 376 U.S. 483, 487-490 (1964) (implicit consent to janitorial personnel to enter motel room does not amount to consent to police search of room) ; O'Connor v. Ortega, 480 U.S. 709, 717 (1987) (a government employee has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his office, even though "it is the nature of government offices that others — such as fellow employees, supervisors, consensual visitors, and the general public — may have frequent access to an individual's office") . As JUSTICE SCALIA aptly put it, the Fourth Amendment protects "privacy . . . not solitude." ”

“ Our precedent, therefore, leaves no room to doubt that, had respondents been carrying their personal effects in opaque, sealed plastic bags — identical to the ones they placed on the curb — their privacy would have been protected from warrantless police intrusion. So far as Fourth Amendment protection is concerned, opaque plastic bags are every bit as [p49] worthy as "packages wrapped in green opaque plastic" and "double-locked footlocker [s] ." ”

“ Their contents are not inherently any less private, and Greenwood's decision to discard them, at least in the manner in which he did, does not diminish his expectation of privacy. [2] [p50]
A trash bag, like any of the above-mentioned containers, "is a common repository for one's personal effects" and, even more than many of them, is "therefore . . . inevitably associated with the expectation of privacy." Sanders, supra, at 762 (citing Chadwick, supra, at 13) . " [A] lmost every human activity ultimately manifests itself in waste products. ”

“ As Justice Stewart stated in Robbins, the Fourth Amendment provides protection to the owner of every container that conceals its contents from plain view. Id. at 822-823 (emphasis added; footnote and citation omitted) . See also Jacobsen, 466 U.S. at 129 (opinion of WHITE, J.) .
Accordingly, we have found a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of a 200-pound "double-locked footlocker," United States v. Chadwick, 433 U.S. 1, 11 (1977) ; a "comparatively small, unlocked suitcase," Arkansas v. Sanders, 442 U.S. 753, 762, n. 9 (1979) ”

“ But the authority that leads the Court to be "distinctly unimpressed" with our position, ante at 43, n. 5, is itself impressively undistinguished. Of 11 Federal Court of Appeals cases cited by the Court, at least 2 are factually or legally distinguishable, see United States v. ”