Agreement at the Supreme Court: The Three Important Principles Underlying Riley v. California
When the Supreme Court term ended in June, many people proclaimed that unanimity at the Court was on the rise. Although this was true by some measures, when it came to the term’s most closely-watched cases, agreement as to the proper result generally belied sharp disagreement as to the reasoning behind that result. One notable exception was the Court’s decision in Riley v. California and United States v. Wurie, companion cases in which all nine justices agreed that that the police generally may not search an arrestee’s cell phone without a warrant.
In his opinion for the Court, Chief Justice Roberts put it plainly: “Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple—get a warrant.” As the Court explained, “modern cell phones . .. are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy,” and the type and quantity of information stored on modern cell phones means that a search of one’s phone can present a significant intrusion on one’s privacy. For these reasons, the Court concluded that its prior precedent allowing searches of physical objects incident to an arrest did not make sense as applied to the digital content on cell phones. The Court’s decision in these cases was incredibly important, but just as important—and in some ways more surprising—was the justices’ broad agreement about the principles underlying that decision.
