One of the early U.S. Supreme Court cases concerning search and seizure is known as Katz v. United States. A portion of the Court's opinion in this case is given below. Also included is a portion of Justice Harlan's concurring opinion. Read this material carefully and then go on to the questions that follow.

KATZ v. UNITED STATES

389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967)

MR. JUSTICE STEWART delivered the opinion of the Court.

The petitioner was convicted in the District Court for the Southern District of California under an eight-count indictment charging him with transmitting wagering information by telephone from Los Angeles to Miami and Boston, in violation of a federal statute. At trial the Government was permitted, over the petitioner's objection, to introduce evidence of the petitioner's end of telephone conversations, overheard by FBI agents who had attached an electronic listening and recording device to the outside of the public telephone booth from which he had placed his calls. In affirming his conviction, the Court of Appeals rejected the contention that the recordings had been obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment because "{t}here was no physical entrance into the area occupied by {the petitioner}." We granted certiorari in order to consider the constitutional questions thus presented.

The petitioner has phrased those questions as follows:

1. Whether a public telephone booth is a constitutionally protected area so that evidence obtained by attaching an electronic listening recording device to the top of such a booth is obtained in violation of the right to privacy of the user of the booth.
   
   
2. Whether physical penetration of a constitutionally protected area is necessary before a search and seizure can be said to be violative of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution."

We decline to adopt this formulation of the issues. In the first place, the correct solution of the Fourth Amendment problems is not necessarily promoted by incantation of the phrase "constitutionally protected area." Secondly, the Fourth Amendment cannot be translated into a general constitutional "right of privacy." That Amendment protects individual privacy against certain kinds of governmental intrusion, but its protections go further, and often have nothing to do with privacy at all....

Because of the misleading way the issues have been formulated, the parties have attached great significance to the characterization of the telephone booth from which the petitioner placed his calls. The petitioner has strenuously argued that the booth was a "constitutionally protected area." The Government has maintained with equal vigor that it was not. But this effort to decide whether or not a given "area," viewed in the abstract, is "constitutionally protected" deflects attention from the problem presented by this case. For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection....But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected....

No less than an individual in a business office, in a friend's apartment, or in a taxicab, a person in a telephone booth may rely upon the protection of the Fourth Amendment. One who occupies it, shuts the door behind him, and pays the toll that permits him to place a call is surely entitled to assume that the words he utters into the mouthpiece will not be broadcast to the world....

The Government's activities in electronically listening to and recording the petitioner's words violated the privacy upon which he justifiably relied while using the telephone booth and thus constituted a "search and seizure" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The fact that the electronic device employed to achieve that end did not happen to penetrate the wall of the booth can have no constitutional significance....

Wherever a man may be, he is entitled to know that he will remain free from unreasonable searches and seizures....the judgment must be reversed.

It is so ordered.

MR. JUSTICE HARLAN, concurring.

I join the opinion of the Court....

As the Court's opinion states, "the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places." The question, however, is what protection it affords to those people. Generally, as here, the answer to that question requires reference to a "place." My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold requirement, first that a person has exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Thus a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the "plain view" of outsiders are not "protected" because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited.

1			Imagine that Mr. Katz had placed his telephone calls from the following locations. Could the Supreme Court's ruling have been different in any of these situations? a telephone mounted on the wall of a corridor at a busy airport a telephone sitting on the bar at a local tavern a telephone booth which was designed and built without a door
2			How would the "reasonable expectation of privacy" referred to by Justice Harlan be evaluated in each of the situations given in Question 1? Is "reasonable expectation of privacy" something that a person either has or does not have in some absolute form, or does it exist "more or less," depending on the situation?
3			What is the significance of the Supreme Court's statement that the "Fourth Amendment protects people, not places"? Why was this idea an important part of this case?