GEORGIA v. RANDOLPH

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103 OCTOBER TERM, 2005
Syllabus
GEORGIA v. RANDOLPH
certiorari to the supreme court of georgia
No. 04–1067. Argued November 8, 2005—Decided March 22, 2006
Respondent’s estranged wife gave police permission to search the marital
residence for items of drug use after respondent, who was also present,
had unequivocally refused to give consent. Respondent was indicted
for possession of cocaine, and the trial court denied his motion to sup
press the evidence as products of a warrantless search unauthorized by
consent. The Georgia Court of Appeals reversed. In affirming, the
State Supreme Court held that consent given by one occupant is not
valid in the face of the refusal of another physically present occupant,
and distinguished United States v. Matlock, 415 U. S. 164, which recog
nized the permissibility of an entry made with the consent of one co
occupant in the other’s absence.
Held: In the circumstances here at issue, a physically present co
occupant’s stated refusal to permit entry renders warrantless entry and
search unreasonable and invalid as to him. Pp. 109–123.
(a) The Fourth Amendment recognizes a valid warrantless entry and
search of a premises when the police obtain the voluntary consent of an
occupant who shares, or is reasonably believed to share, common au
thority over the property, and no present co-tenant objects. Matlock,
supra, at 170; Illinois v. Rodriguez, 497 U. S. 177, 186. The constant
element in assessing Fourth Amendment reasonableness in such cases
is the great significance given to widely shared social expectations,
which are influenced by property law but not controlled by its rules.
Thus, Matlock not only holds that a solitary co-inhabitant may some
times consent to a search of shared premises, but also stands for the
proposition that the reasonableness of such a search is in significant part
a function of commonly held understandings about the authority that
co-inhabitants may exercise in ways that affect each other’s interests.
Pp. 109–111.
(b) Matlock’s example of common understanding is readily apparent.
The assumption tenants usually make about their common authority
when they share quarters is that any one of them may admit visitors,
with the consequence that a guest obnoxious to one may be admitted in
his absence. Matlock placed no burden on the police to eliminate the
possibility of atypical arrangements, absent reason to doubt that the
regular scheme was in place. Pp. 111–112.

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(c) This Court took a step toward addressing the issue here when it
held in Minnesota v. Olson, 495 U. S. 91, that overnight houseguests
have a legitimate expectation of privacy in their temporary quarters.
If that customary expectation is a foundation of a houseguest’s Fourth
Amendment rights, it should follow that an inhabitant of shared prem
ises may claim at least as much. In fact, a co-inhabitant naturally has
an even stronger claim. No sensible person would enter shared prem
ises based on one occupant’s invitation when a fellow tenant said to stay
out. Such reticence would show not timidity but a realization that
when people living together disagree over the use of their common quar
ters, a resolution must come through voluntary accommodation, not by
appeals to authority. Absent some recognized hierarchy, e. g., parent
and child, there is no societal or legal understanding of superior and
inferior as between co-tenants. Pp. 113–114.
(d) Thus, a disputed invitation, without more, gives an officer no
better claim to reasonableness in entering than the officer would have
absent any consent. Disputed permission is no match for the Fourth
Amendment central value of “respect for the privacy of the home,”
Wilson v. Layne, 526 U. S. 603, 610, and the State’s other countervailing
claims do not add up to outweigh it.
A co-tenant who has an interest in bringing criminal activity to light
or in deflecting suspicion from himself can, e. g., tell the police what he
knows, for use before a magistrate in getting a warrant. This case,
which recognizes limits on evidentiary searches, has no bearing on the
capacity of the police, at the invitation of one tenant, to enter a dwelling
over another tenant’s objection in order to protect a resident from do
mestic violence. Though alternatives to disputed consent will not al
ways open the door to search for evidence that the police suspect is
inside, nothing in social custom or its reflection in private law argues
for placing a higher value on delving into private premises to search for
evidence in the face of disputed consent, than on requiring clear justifi
cation before the government searches private living quarters over a
resident’s objection. Pp. 114–120.
(e) There are two loose ends. First, while Matlock’s explanation for
the constitutional sufficiency of a co-tenant’s consent to enter and search
recognized a co-inhabitant’s “right to permit the inspection in his own
right,” 415 U. S., at 171, n. 7, the right to admit the police is not a
right as understood under property law. It is, instead, the authority
recognized by customary social usage as having a substantial bearing
on Fourth Amendment reasonableness in specific circumstances. The
question here is whether customary social understanding accords the
consenting tenant authority to prevail over the co-tenant’s objection, a
question Matlock did not answer. Second, a fine line must be drawn to

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avoid undercutting Matlock—where the defendant, though not present,
was in a squad car not far away—and Rodriguez—where the defendant
was asleep in the apartment and could have been roused by a knock on
the door; if a potential defendant with self-interest in objecting is in fact
at the door and objects, the co-tenant’s permission does not suffice for a
reasonable search, whereas the potential objector, nearby but not part
of the threshold colloquy, loses out. Such formalism is justified. So
long as there is no evidence that the police have removed the potentially
objecting tenant from the entrance specifically to avoid a possible objec
tion, there is practical value in the simple clarity of complementary
rules, one recognizing the co-tenant’s permission when no fellow occu
pant is on hand, the other according dispositive weight to the fellow
occupant’s expressed contrary indication. Pp. 120–122.
(f) Here, respondent’s refusal is clear, and nothing in the record
justifies the search on grounds independent of his wife’s consent.
Pp. 122–123.
278 Ga. 614, 604 S. E. 2d 835, affirmed.
Souter, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Stevens, Ken
nedy, Ginsburg, and Breyer, JJ., joined. Stevens, J., post, p. 123, and
Breyer, J., post, p. 125, filed concurring opinions. Roberts, C. J., filed a
dissenting opinion, in which Scalia, J., joined, post, p. 127. Scalia, J.,
post, p. 142, and Thomas, J., post, p. 145, filed dissenting opinions. Alito,
J., took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
Paula K. Smith, Senior Assistant Attorney General of
Georgia, argued the cause for petitioner. With her on the
briefs were Thurbert E. Baker, Attorney General, and Mary
Beth Westmoreland, Deputy Attorney General.
Deputy Solicitor General Dreeben argued the cause for
the United States as amicus curiae urging reversal. With
him on the brief were Solicitor General Clement, Acting
Assistant Attorney General Richter, Sri Srinivasan, and
Deborah Watson.
Thomas C. Goldstein argued the cause for respondent.
With him on the brief were Amy Howe, Kevin K. Russell,
Donald F. Samuel, and Pamela S. Karlan.*
*A brief of amici curiae urging reversal was filed for the State of Colo
rado et al. by John W. Suthers, Attorney General of Colorado, John J.
Krause, Interim Solicitor General, and Rebecca A. Adams, Assistant At

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106 GEORGIA v. RANDOLPH
Opinion of the Court
Justice Souter delivered the opinion of the Court.
The Fourth Amendment recognizes a valid warrantless
entry and search of premises when police obtain the volun
tary consent of an occupant who shares, or is reasonably be
lieved to share, authority over the area in common with a
co-occupant who later objects to the use of evidence so ob
tained. Illinois v. Rodriguez, 497 U. S. 177 (1990); United
States v. Matlock, 415 U. S. 164 (1974). The question here
is whether such an evidentiary seizure is likewise lawful with
the permission of one occupant when the other, who later
seeks to suppress the evidence, is present at the scene and
expressly refuses to consent. We hold that, in the circum
stances here at issue, a physically present co-occupant’s
stated refusal to permit entry prevails, rendering the war
rantless search unreasonable and invalid as to him.
I
Respondent Scott Randolph and his wife, Janet, separated
in late May 2001, when she left the marital residence in
Americus, Georgia, and went to stay with her parents in
Canada, taking their son and some belongings. In July, she
returned to the Americus house with the child, though the
record does not reveal whether her object was reconciliation
or retrieval of remaining possessions.
torney General, and by the Attorneys General for their respective States
as follows: Troy King of Alabama, M. Jane Brady of Delaware, Mark J.
Bennett of Hawaii, Lisa Madigan of Illinois, Phill Kline of Kansas, J.
Joseph Curran, Jr., of Maryland, Michael A. Cox of Michigan, Jeremiah
W. (Jay) Nixon of Missouri, Mike McGrath of Montana, Brian Sandoval
of Nevada, Wayne Stenehjem of North Dakota, Jim Petro of Ohio, W. A.
Drew Edmondson of Oklahoma, Hardy Myers of Oregon, Thomas W. Cor
bett, Jr., of Pennsylvania, Lawrence E. Long of South Dakota, Mark L.
Shurtleff of Utah, William Sorrell of Vermont, Rob McKenna of Wash
ington, and Patrick J. Crank of Wyoming.
Jeffrey A. Lamken and Pamela Harris filed a brief for the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers as amicus cur iae urging
affirmance.

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On the morning of July 6, she complained to the police that
after a domestic dispute her husband took their son away,
and when officers reached the house she told them that her
husband was a cocaine user whose habit had caused financial
troubles. She mentioned the marital problems and said that
she and their son had only recently returned after a stay
of several weeks with her parents. Shortly after the police
arrived, Scott Randolph returned and explained that he had
removed the child to a neighbor’s house out of concern that
his wife might take the boy out of the country again; he de
nied cocaine use, and countered that it was in fact his wife
who abused drugs and alcohol.
One of the officers, Sergeant Murray, went with Janet
Randolph to reclaim the child, and when they returned she
not only renewed her complaints about her husband’s drug
use, but also volunteered that there were “ ‘items of drug
evidence’ ” in the house. Brief for Petitioner 3. Sergeant
Murray asked Scott Randolph for permission to search the
house, which he unequivocally refused.
The sergeant turned to Janet Randolph for consent to
search, which she readily gave. She led the officer upstairs
to a bedroom that she identified as Scott’s, where the ser
geant noticed a section of a drinking straw with a powdery
residue he suspected was cocaine. He then left the house to
get an evidence bag from his car and to call the district attor
ney’s office, which instructed him to stop the search and
apply for a warrant. When Sergeant Murray returned to
the house, Janet Randolph withdrew her consent. The
police took the straw to the police station, along with the
Randolphs. After getting a search warrant, they returned
to the house and seized further evidence of drug use, on the
basis of which Scott Randolph was indicted for possession
of cocaine.
He moved to suppress the evidence, as products of a war
rantless search of his house unauthorized by his wife’s con
sent over his express refusal. The trial court denied the

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motion, ruling that Janet Randolph had common authority to
consent to the search.
The Court of Appeals of Georgia reversed, 264 Ga. App.
396, 590 S. E. 2d 834 (2003), and was itself sustained by the
State Supreme Court, principally on the ground that “the
consent to conduct a warrantless search of a residence given
by one occupant is not valid in the face of the refusal of an
other occupant who is physically present at the scene to per
mit a warrantless search,” 278 Ga. 614, 604 S. E. 2d 835, 836
(2004). The Supreme Court of Georgia acknowledged this
Court’s holding in Matlock, 415 U. S. 164, that “the consent
of one who possesses common authority over premises or
effects is valid as against the absent, nonconsenting person
with whom that authority is shared,” id., at 170, and found
Matlock distinguishable just because Scott Randolph was
not “absent” from the colloquy on which the police relied
for consent to make the search. The State Supreme Court
stressed that the officers in Matlock had not been “faced
with the physical presence of joint occupants, with one con
senting to the search and the other objecting.” 278 Ga., at
615, 604 S. E. 2d, at 837. It held that an individual who
chooses to live with another assumes a risk no greater than
“ ‘an inability to control access to the premises during [his]
absence,’ ” ibid. (quoting 3 W. LaFave, Search and Seizure
§ 8.3(d), p. 731 (3d ed. 1996) (hereinafter LaFave)), and does
not contemplate that his objection to a request to search
commonly shared premises, if made, will be overlooked.
We granted certiorari to resolve a split of authority on
whether one occupant may give law enforcement effective
consent to search shared premises, as against a co-tenant
who is present and states a refusal to permit the search.1
544 U. S. 973 (2005). We now affirm.
1 All four Courts of Appeals to have considered this question have con
cluded that consent remains effective in the face of an express objection.
See United States v. Morning, 64 F. 3d 531, 533–536 (CA9 1995); United
States v. Donlin, 982 F. 2d 31, 33 (CA1 1992); United States v. Hendrix,

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II
To the Fourth Amendment rule ordinarily prohibiting the
warrantless entry of a person’s house as unreasonable per se,
Payton v. New York, 445 U. S. 573, 586 (1980); Coolidge v.
New Hampshire, 403 U. S. 443, 454–455 (1971), one “jealously
and carefully drawn” exception, Jones v. United States, 357
U. S. 493, 499 (1958), recognizes the validity of searches with
the voluntary consent of an individual possessing authority,
Rodriguez, 497 U. S., at 181. That person might be the
householder against whom evidence is sought, Schneckloth
v. Bustamonte, 412 U. S. 218, 222 (1973), or a fellow occupant
who shares common authority over property, when the sus
pect is absent, Matlock, supra, at 170, and the exception for
consent extends even to entries and searches with the per
mission of a co-occupant whom the police reasonably, but er
roneously, believe to possess shared authority as an occu
pant, Rodriguez, supra, at 186. None of our co-occupant
consent-to-search cases, however, has presented the further
fact of a second occupant physically present and refusing per
mission to search, and later moving to suppress evidence so
obtained.2 The significance of such a refusal turns on the
underpinnings of the co-occupant consent rule, as recognized
since Matlock.
A
The defendant in that case was arrested in the yard of a
house where he lived with a Mrs. Graff and several of her
595 F. 2d 883, 885 (CADC 1979) (per curiam); United States v. Sumlin,
567 F. 2d 684, 687–688 (CA6 1977). Of the state courts that have ad
dressed the question, the majority have reached that conclusion as well.
See, e. g., Love v. State, 355 Ark. 334, 342, 138 S. W. 3d 676, 680 (2003);
Laramie v. Hysong, 808 P. 2d 199, 203–205 (Wyo. 1991); but cf. State v.
Leach, 113 Wash. 2d 735, 744, 782 P. 2d 1035, 1040 (1989) (en banc) (requir
ing consent of all present co-occupants).
2 Mindful of the multiplicity of living arrangements, we vary the terms
used to describe residential co-occupancies. In so doing we do not mean,
however, to suggest that the rule to be applied to them is similarly varied.

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relatives, and was detained in a squad car parked nearby.
When the police went to the door, Mrs. Graff admitted them
and consented to a search of the house. 415 U. S., at 166.
In resolving the defendant’s objection to use of the evidence
taken in the warrantless search, we said that “the consent of
one who possesses common authority over premises or ef
fects is valid as against the absent, nonconsenting person
with whom that authority is shared.” Id., at 170. Consist
ent with our prior understanding that Fourth Amendment
rights are not limited by the law of property, cf. Katz v.
United States, 389 U. S. 347, 352–353 (1967), we explained
that the third party’s “common authority” is not synonymous
with a technical property interest:
“The authority which justifies the third-party consent
does not rest upon the law of property, with its attend
ant historical and legal refinements, but rests rather on
mutual use of the property by persons generally having
joint access or control for most purposes, so that it is
reasonable to recognize that any of the co-inhabitants
has the right to permit the inspection in his own right
and that the others have assumed the risk that one of
their number might permit the common area to be
searched.” 415 U. S., at 171, n. 7 (citations omitted).
See also Frazier v. Cupp, 394 U. S. 731, 740 (1969) (“[I]n
allowing [his cousin to share use of a duffel bag] and in leav
ing it in his house, [the suspect] must be taken to have as
sumed the risk that [the cousin] would allow someone else to
look inside”). The common authority that counts under the
Fourth Amendment may thus be broader than the rights ac
corded by property law, see Rodriguez, supra, at 181–182
(consent is sufficient when given by a person who reasonably
appears to have common authority but who, in fact, has no
property interest in the premises searched), although its
limits, too, reflect specialized tenancy arrangements appar
ent to the police, see Chapman v. United States, 365 U. S.

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610 (1961) (landlord could not consent to search of tenant’s
home).
The constant element in assessing Fourth Amendment
reasonableness in the consent cases, then, is the great sig
nificance given to widely shared social expectations, which
are naturally enough influenced by the law of property, but
not controlled by its rules. Cf. Rakas v. Illinois, 439 U. S.
128, 144, n. 12 (1978) (an expectation of privacy is reasonable
if it has “a source outside of the Fourth Amendment, either
by reference to concepts of real or personal property law
or to understandings that are recognized and permitted by
society”). Matlock accordingly not only holds that a solitary
co-inhabitant may sometimes consent to a search of shared
premises, but stands for the proposition that the reasona
bleness of such a search is in significant part a function of
commonly held understanding about the authority that co
inhabitants may exercise in ways that affect each other’s
interests.
B
Matlock’s example of common understanding is readily ap
parent. When someone comes to the door of a domestic
dwelling with a baby at her hip, as Mrs. Graff did, she shows
that she belongs there, and that fact standing alone is enough
to tell a law enforcement officer or any other visitor that if
she occupies the place along with others, she probably lives
there subject to the assumption tenants usually make about
their common authority when they share quarters. They
understand that any one of them may admit visitors, with
the consequence that a guest obnoxious to one may neverthe
less be admitted in his absence by another. As Matlock put
it, shared tenancy is understood to include an “assumption of
risk,” on which police officers are entitled to rely, and al
though some group living together might make an excep
tional arrangement that no one could admit a guest without
the agreement of all, the chance of such an eccentric scheme
is too remote to expect visitors to investigate a particular

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household’s rules before accepting an invitation to come in.
So, Matlock relied on what was usual and placed no burden
on the police to eliminate the possibility of atypical arrange
ments, in the absence of reason to doubt that the regular
scheme was in place.
It is also easy to imagine different facts on which, if
known, no common authority could sensibly be suspected.
A person on the scene who identifies himself, say, as a land
lord or a hotel manager calls up no customary understanding
of authority to admit guests without the consent of the cur
rent occupant. See Chapman v. United States, supra (land
lord); Stoner v. California, 376 U. S. 483 (1964) (hotel man
ager). A tenant in the ordinary course does not take rented
premises subject to any formal or informal agreement that
the landlord may let visitors into the dwelling, Chapman,
supra, at 617, and a hotel guest customarily has no reason to
expect the manager to allow anyone but his own employees
into his room, see Stoner, supra, at 489; see also United
States v. Jeffers, 342 U. S. 48, 51 (1951) (hotel staff had access
to room for purposes of cleaning and maintenance, but no
authority to admit police). In these circumstances, neither
state-law property rights, nor common contractual arrange
ments, nor any other source points to a common understand
ing of authority to admit third parties generally without the
consent of a person occupying the premises. And when it
comes to searching through bureau drawers, there will be
instances in which even a person clearly belonging on prem
ises as an occupant may lack any perceived authority to con
sent; “a child of eight might well be considered to have the
power to consent to the police crossing the threshold into
that part of the house where any caller, such as a pollster or
salesman, might well be admitted,” 4 LaFave § 8.4(c), at 207
(4th ed. 2004), but no one would reasonably expect such a
child to be in a position to authorize anyone to rummage
through his parents’ bedroom.

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C
Although we have not dealt directly with the reasonable
ness of police entry in reliance on consent by one occupant
subject to immediate challenge by another, we took a step
toward the issue in an earlier case dealing with the Fourth
Amendment rights of a social guest arrested at premises the
police entered without a warrant or the benefit of any excep
tion to the warrant requirement. Minnesota v. Olson, 495
U. S. 91 (1990), held that overnight houseguests have a legiti
mate expectation of privacy in their temporary quarters be
cause “it is unlikely that [the host] will admit someone who
wants to see or meet with the guest over the objection of
the guest,” id., at 99. If that customary expectation of cour
tesy or deference is a foundation of Fourth Amendment
rights of a houseguest, it presumably should follow that an
inhabitant of shared premises may claim at least as much,
and it turns out that the co-inhabitant naturally has an even
stronger claim.
To begin with, it is fair to say that a caller standing at the
door of shared premises would have no confidence that one
occupant’s invitation was a sufficiently good reason to enter
when a fellow tenant stood there saying, “stay out.” With
out some very good reason, no sensible person would go in
side under those conditions. Fear for the safety of the occu
pant issuing the invitation, or of someone else inside, would
be thought to justify entry, but the justification then would
be the personal risk, the threats to life or limb, not the dis
puted invitation.3
The visitor’s reticence without some such good reason
would show not timidity but a realization that when people
living together disagree over the use of their common quar
3 Cf. Mincey v. Arizona, 437 U. S. 385, 393 (1978) (acknowledging the
right of police to respond to emergency situations “threatening life or
limb” and indicating that police may conduct a warrantless search pro
vided that the search is “ ‘strictly circumscribed by the exigencies which
justify its initiation’ ”).

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ters, a resolution must come through voluntary accommoda
tion, not by appeals to authority. Unless the people living
together fall within some recognized hierarchy, like a house
hold of parent and child or barracks housing military person
nel of different grades, there is no societal understanding of
superior and inferior, a fact reflected in a standard formula
tion of domestic property law, that “[e]ach cotenant . . . has
the right to use and enjoy the entire property as if he or she
were the sole owner, limited only by the same right in the
other cotenants.” 7 R. Powell, Powell on Real Property
§ 50.03[1], p. 50–14 (M. Wolf gen. ed. 2005). The want of any
recognized superior authority among disagreeing tenants is
also reflected in the law’s response when the disagreements
cannot be resolved. The law does not ask who has the bet
ter side of the conflict; it simply provides a right to any
co-tenant, even the most unreasonable, to obtain a decree
partitioning the property (when the relationship is one of
co-ownership) and terminating the relationship. See, e. g., 2
H. Tiffany, Real Property §§ 468, 473, 474, pp. 297, 307–309
(3d ed. 1939 and 2006 Cum. Supp.). And while a decree of
partition is not the answer to disagreement among rental
tenants, this situation resembles co-ownership in lacking the
benefit of any understanding that one or the other rental
co-tenant has a superior claim to control the use of the quar
ters they occupy together. In sum, there is no common
understanding that one co-tenant generally has a right or
authority to prevail over the express wishes of another,
whether the issue is the color of the curtains or invitations
to outsiders.
D
Since the co-tenant wishing to open the door to a third
party has no recognized authority in law or social practice to
prevail over a present and objecting co-tenant, his disputed
invitation, without more, gives a police officer no better claim
to reasonableness in entering than the officer would have in
the absence of any consent at all. Accordingly, in the bal

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ancing of competing individual and governmental interests
entailed by the bar to unreasonable searches, Camara v. Mu
nicipal Court of City and County of San Francisco, 387
U. S. 523, 536–537 (1967), the cooperative occupant’s invita
tion adds nothing to the government’s side to counter the
force of an objecting individual’s claim to security against
the government’s intrusion into his dwelling place. Since
we hold to the “centuries-old principle of respect for the pri
vacy of the home,” Wilson v. Layne, 526 U. S. 603, 610 (1999),
“it is beyond dispute that the home is entitled to special pro
tection as the center of the private lives of our people,” Min
nesota v. Carter, 525 U. S. 83, 99 (1998) (Kennedy, J., concur
ring). We have, after all, lived our whole national history
with an understanding of “the ancient adage that a man’s
house is his castle [to the point that t]he poorest man may in
his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown,”
Miller v. United States, 357 U. S. 301, 307 (1958) (internal
quotation marks omitted).4
Disputed permission is thus no match for this central value
of the Fourth Amendment, and the State’s other countervail
ing claims do not add up to outweigh it.5 Yes, we recognize
the consenting tenant’s interest as a citizen in bringing crim
4 In the principal dissent’s view, the centuries of special protection for
the privacy of the home are over. The dissent equates inviting the police
into a co-tenant’s home over his contemporaneous objection with reporting
a secret, post, at 142 (opinion of Roberts, C. J.), and the emphasis it places
on the false equation suggests a deliberate intent to devalue the impor
tance of the privacy of a dwelling place. The same attitude that privacy
of a dwelling is not special underlies the dissent’s easy assumption that
privacy shared with another individual is privacy waived for all purposes
including warrantless searches by the police. Post, at 131.
5 A generalized interest in expedient law enforcement cannot, without
more, justify a warrantless search. See Mincey, supra, at 393 (“[T]he
privacy of a person’s home and property may not be totally sacrificed in
the name of maximum simplicity in enforcement of the criminal law”);
Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U. S. 443, 481 (1971) (“The warrant
requirement . . . is not an inconvenience to be somehow ‘weighed’ against
the claims of police efficiency”).

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inal activity to light, see Coolidge, 403 U. S., at 488 (“[I]t is
no part of the policy underlying the Fourth . . . Amendmen[t]
to discourage citizens from aiding to the utmost of their abil
ity in the apprehension of criminals”). And we understand
a co-tenant’s legitimate self-interest in siding with the police
to deflect suspicion raised by sharing quarters with a crimi
nal, see 4 LaFave § 8.3(d), at 162, n. 72 (“The risk of being
convicted of possession of drugs one knows are present and
has tried to get the other occupant to remove is by no means
insignificant”); cf. Schneckloth, 412 U. S., at 243 (evidence ob
tained pursuant to a consent search “may insure that a
wholly innocent person is not wrongly charged with a crimi
nal offense”).
But society can often have the benefit of these interests
without relying on a theory of consent that ignores an inhab
itant’s refusal to allow a warrantless search. The co-tenant
acting on his own initiative may be able to deliver evidence
to the police, Coolidge, supra, at 487–489 (suspect’s wife re
trieved his guns from the couple’s house and turned them
over to the police), and can tell the police what he knows, for
use before a magistrate in getting a warrant.6 The reliance
6 Sometimes, of course, the very exchange of information like this in
front of the objecting inhabitant may render consent irrelevant by creating
an exigency that justifies immediate action on the police’s part; if the ob
jecting tenant cannot be incapacitated from destroying easily disposable
evidence during the time required to get a warrant, see Illinois v.
McArthur, 531 U. S. 326, 331–332 (2001) (denying suspect access to his
trailer home while police applied for a search warrant), a fairly perceived
need to act on the spot to preserve evidence may justify entry and search
under the exigent circumstances exception to the warrant requirement,
cf. Schmerber v. California, 384 U. S. 757, 770–771 (1966) (warrant
less search permitted when “the delay necessary to obtain a warrant
. . . threatened the destruction of evidence” (internal quotation marks
omitted)).
Additional exigent circumstances might justify warrantless searches.
See, e. g., Warden, Md. Penitentiary v. Hayden, 387 U. S. 294, 298 (1967)
(hot pursuit); Chimel v. California, 395 U. S. 752 (1969) (protecting the
safety of the police officers); Michigan v. Tyler, 436 U. S. 499 (1978) (immi

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117 Cite as: 547 U. S. 103 (2006)
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on a co-tenant’s information instead of disputed consent ac
cords with the law’s general partiality toward “police action
taken under a warrant [as against] searches and seizures
without one,” United States v. Ventresca, 380 U. S. 102, 107
(1965); “the informed and deliberate determinations of mag
istrates empowered to issue warrants as to what searches
and seizures are permissible under the Constitution are to
be preferred over the hurried action of officers,” United
States v. Lefkowitz, 285 U. S. 452, 464 (1932).
Nor should this established policy of Fourth Amendment
law be undermined by the principal dissent’s claim that it
shields spousal abusers and other violent co-tenants who will
refuse to allow the police to enter a dwelling when their
victims ask the police for help, post, at 138 (opinion of Rob
erts, C. J.) (hereinafter the dissent). It is not that the dis
sent exaggerates violence in the home; we recognize that
domestic abuse is a serious problem in the United States.
See U. S. Dept. of Justice, National Institute of Justice,
P. Tjaden & N. Thoennes, Full Report of the Prevalence,
Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women
25–26 (2000) (noting that over 20 million women and 6 million
men will, in the course of their lifetimes, be the victims of
intimate-partner abuse); U. S. Dept. of Health and Human
Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Na
tional Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Costs of
Intimate Partner Violence Against Women in the United
States 19 (2003) (finding that nearly 5.3 million intimate
partner victimizations, which result in close to 2 million in
juries and 1,300 deaths, occur among women in the United
States each year); U. S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice
Statistics, Crime Data Brief, C. Rennison, Intimate Part
ner Violence, 1993–2001 (Feb. 2003) (noting that in 2001
intimate-partner violence made up 20% of violent crime
against women); see also Becker, The Politics of Women’s
nent destruction to building); Johnson v. United States, 333 U. S. 10, 15
(1948) (likelihood that suspect will imminently flee).

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118 GEORGIA v. RANDOLPH
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Wrongs and the Bill of “Rights”: A Bicentennial Perspective,
59 U. Chi. L. Rev. 453, 507–508 (1992) (noting that women
may feel physical insecurity in their homes as a result of
abuse from domestic partners).
But this case has no bearing on the capacity of the police
to protect domestic victims. The dissent’s argument rests
on the failure to distinguish two different issues: when the
police may enter without committing a trespass, and when
the police may enter to search for evidence. No question
has been raised, or reasonably could be, about the authority
of the police to enter a dwelling to protect a resident from
domestic violence; so long as they have good reason to be
lieve such a threat exists, it would be silly to suggest that
the police would commit a tort by entering, say, to give a
complaining tenant the opportunity to collect belongings and
get out safely, or to determine whether violence (or threat of
violence) has just occurred or is about to (or soon will) occur,
however much a spouse or other co-tenant objected. (And
since the police would then be lawfully in the premises, there
is no question that they could seize any evidence in plain
view or take further action supported by any consequent
probable cause, see Texas v. Brown, 460 U. S. 730, 737–739
(1983) (plurality opinion).) Thus, the question whether the
police might lawfully enter over objection in order to provide
any protection that might be reasonable is easily answered
yes. See 4 LaFave § 8.3(d), at 161 (“[E]ven when . . . two
persons quite clearly have equal rights in the place, as where
two individuals are sharing an apartment on an equal basis,
there may nonetheless sometimes exist a basis for giving
greater recognition to the interests of one over the other. . . .
[W]here the defendant has victimized the third-party . . . the
emergency nature of the situation is such that the third
party consent should validate a warrantless search despite
defendant’s objections” (internal quotation marks omitted;
third omission in original)). The undoubted right of the po

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Opinion of the Court
lice to enter in order to protect a victim, however, has noth
ing to do with the question in this case, whether a search
with the consent of one co-tenant is good against another,
standing at the door and expressly refusing consent.7
None of the cases cited by the dissent support its improb
able view that recognizing limits on merely evidentiary
searches would compromise the capacity to protect a fearful
occupant. In the circumstances of those cases, there is no
danger that the fearful occupant will be kept behind the
closed door of the house simply because the abusive tenant
refuses to consent to a search. See United States v. Donlin,
982 F. 2d 31, 32 (CA1 1992) (victimized individual was al
ready outside of her apartment when police arrived and, for
all intents and purposes, within the protective custody of law
enforcement officers); United States v. Hendrix, 595 F. 2d
883, 885–886 (CADC 1979) (per curiam) (even if the consent
of the threatened co-occupant did not justify a warrantless
search, the police entry was nevertheless allowable on exi
gent circumstances grounds); People v. Sanders, 904 P. 2d
1311, 1313–1315 (Colo. 1995) (en banc) (victimized individual
gave her consent to search away from her home and was not
present at the time of the police visit; alternatively, exigent
circumstances existed to satisfy the warrantless exception);
Brandon v. State, 778 P. 2d 221, 223–224 (Alaska App. 1989)
(victimized individual consented away from her home and
was not present at the time of the police visit); United States
v. Davis, 290 F. 3d 1239, 1241 (CA10 2002) (immediate
harm extinguished after husband “order[ed]” wife out of
the home).
7 We understand the possibility that a battered individual will be afraid
to express fear candidly, but this does not seem to be a reason to think
such a person would invite the police into the dwelling to search for evi
dence against another. Hence, if a rule crediting consent over denial of
consent were built on hoping to protect household victims, it would distort
the Fourth Amendment with little, if any, constructive effect on domestic
abuse investigations.

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120 GEORGIA v. RANDOLPH
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The dissent’s red herring aside, we know, of course, that
alternatives to disputed consent will not always open the
door to search for evidence that the police suspect is inside.
The consenting tenant may simply not disclose enough infor
mation, or information factual enough, to add up to a show
ing of probable cause, and there may be no exigency to
justify fast action. But nothing in social custom or its re
flection in private law argues for placing a higher value on
delving into private premises to search for evidence in the
face of disputed consent, than on requiring clear justification
before the government searches private living quarters over
a resident’s objection. We therefore hold that a warrantless
search of a shared dwelling for evidence over the express
refusal of consent by a physically present resident cannot be
justified as reasonable as to him on the basis of consent given
to the police by another resident.8
E
There are two loose ends, the first being the explanation
given in Matlock for the constitutional sufficiency of a co
tenant’s consent to enter and search: it “rests . . . on mutual
use of the property by persons generally having joint access
or control for most purposes, so that it is reasonable to recog
nize that any of the co-inhabitants has the right to permit
the inspection in his own right . . . .” 415 U. S., at 171, n. 7.
If Matlock’s co-tenant is giving permission “in his own
right,” how can his “own right” be eliminated by another
tenant’s objection? The answer appears in the very foot
note from which the quoted statement is taken: the “right”
to admit the police to which Matlock refers is not an endur
ing and enforceable ownership right as understood by the
8 The dissent is critical that our holding does not pass upon the constitu
tionality of such a search as to a third tenant against whom the govern
ment wishes to use evidence seized after a search with consent of one
co-tenant subject to the contemporaneous objection of another, post, at
137. We decide the case before us, not a different one.

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private law of property, but is instead the authority recog
nized by customary social usage as having a substantial bear
ing on Fourth Amendment reasonableness in specific circum
stances. Thus, to ask whether the consenting tenant has the
right to admit the police when a physically present fellow
tenant objects is not to question whether some property
right may be divested by the mere objection of another. It
is, rather, the question whether customary social under
standing accords the consenting tenant authority powerful
enough to prevail over the co-tenant’s objection. The Mat
lock Court did not purport to answer this question, a point
made clear by another statement (which the dissent does not
quote): the Court described the co-tenant’s consent as good
against “the absent, nonconsenting” resident. Id., at 170.
The second loose end is the significance of Matlock and
Rodriguez after today’s decision. Although the Matlock de
fendant was not present with the opportunity to object, he
was in a squad car not far away; the Rodriguez defendant
was actually asleep in the apartment, and the police might
have roused him with a knock on the door before they en
tered with only the consent of an apparent co-tenant. If
those cases are not to be undercut by today’s holding, we
have to admit that we are drawing a fine line; if a potential
defendant with self-interest in objecting is in fact at the door
and objects, the co-tenant’s permission does not suffice for a
reasonable search, whereas the potential objector, nearby
but not invited to take part in the threshold colloquy,
loses out.
This is the line we draw, and we think the formalism is
justified. So long as there is no evidence that the police
have removed the potentially objecting tenant from the en
trance for the sake of avoiding a possible objection, there is
practical value in the simple clarity of complementary rules,
one recognizing the co-tenant’s permission when there is no
fellow occupant on hand, the other according dispositive
weight to the fellow occupant’s contrary indication when he

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122 GEORGIA v. RANDOLPH
Opinion of the Court
expresses it. For the very reason that Rodriguez held it
would be unjustifiably impractical to require the police to
take affirmative steps to confirm the actual authority of a
consenting individual whose authority was apparent, we
think it would needlessly limit the capacity of the police to
respond to ostensibly legitimate opportunities in the field if
we were to hold that reasonableness required the police to
take affirmative steps to find a potentially objecting co
tenant before acting on the permission they had already re
ceived. There is no ready reason to believe that efforts to
invite a refusal would make a difference in many cases,
whereas every co-tenant consent case would turn into a test
about the adequacy of the police’s efforts to consult with a
potential objector. Better to accept the formalism of distin
guishing Matlock from this case than to impose a require
ment, time consuming in the field and in the courtroom, with
no apparent systemic justification. The pragmatic decision
to accept the simplicity of this line is, moreover, supported
by the substantial number of instances in which suspects
who are asked for permission to search actually consent,9
albeit imprudently, a fact that undercuts any argument that
the police should try to locate a suspected inhabitant because
his denial of consent would be a foregone conclusion.
III
This case invites a straightforward application of the rule
that a physically present inhabitant’s express refusal of con
sent to a police search is dispositive as to him, regardless of
9 See 4 LaFave § 8.1, at 4 (“The so-called consent search is frequently
relied upon by police as a means of investigating suspected criminal con
duct” (footnote omitted)); Strauss, Reconstructing Consent, 92 J. Crim.
L. & C. 211, 214 (2001–2002) (“Although precise figures detailing the num
ber of searches conducted pursuant to consent are not—and probably can
never be—available, there is no dispute that these type of searches affect
tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people every year”
(footnote omitted)).

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123 Cite as: 547 U. S. 103 (2006)
Stevens, J., concurring
the consent of a fellow occupant. Scott Randolph’s refusal
is clear, and nothing in the record justifies the search on
grounds independent of Janet Randolph’s consent. The
State does not argue that she gave any indication to the po
lice of a need for protection inside the house that might have
justified entry into the portion of the premises where the
police found the powdery straw (which, if lawfully seized,
could have been used when attempting to establish probable
cause for the warrant issued later). Nor does the State
claim that the entry and search should be upheld under the
rubric of exigent circumstances, owing to some apprehension
by the police officers that Scott Randolph would destroy evi
dence of drug use before any warrant could be obtained.
The judgment of the Supreme Court of Georgia is there
fore affirmed.
It is so ordered.
Justice Alito took no part in the consideration or deci
sion of this case.
Justice Stevens, concurring.
The study of history for the purpose of ascertaining the
original understanding of constitutional provisions is much
like the study of legislative history for the purpose of ascer
taining the intent of the lawmakers who enact statutes. In
both situations the facts uncovered by the study are usually
relevant but not necessarily dispositive. This case illus
trates why even the most dedicated adherent to an approach
to constitutional interpretation that places primary reliance
on the search for original understanding would recognize the
relevance of changes in our society.
At least since 1604 it has been settled that in the absence
of exigent circumstances, a government agent has no right
to enter a “house” or “castle” unless authorized to do so by
a valid warrant. See Semayne’s Case, 5 Co. Rep. 91a, 77
Eng. Rep. 194 (K. B.). Every occupant of the home has a

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124 GEORGIA v. RANDOLPH
Stevens, J., concurring
right—protected by the common law for centuries and by
the Fourth Amendment since 1791—to refuse entry. When
an occupant gives his or her consent to enter, he or she is
waiving a valuable constitutional right. To be sure that the
waiver is voluntary, it is sound practice—a practice some
Justices of this Court thought necessary to make the waiver
voluntary 1—for the officer to advise the occupant of that
right.2 The issue in this case relates to the content of the
advice that the officer should provide when met at the door
by a man and a woman who are apparently joint tenants or
joint owners of the property.
In the 18th century, when the Fourth Amendment was
adopted, the advice would have been quite different from
what is appropriate today. Given the then-prevailing dra
matic differences between the property rights of the hus
band and the far lesser rights of the wife, only the consent
of the husband would matter. Whether “the master of the
house” consented or objected, his decision would control.
Thus if “original understanding” were to govern the outcome
of this case, the search was clearly invalid because the hus
band did not consent. History, however, is not dispositive
because it is now clear, as a matter of constitutional law, that
1 See, e. g., Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U. S. 218, 284–285 (1973)
(Marshall, J., dissenting) (pointing out that it is hard to comprehend “how
a decision made without knowledge of available alternatives can be treated
as a choice at all,” and arguing that “[i]f consent to search means that a
person has chosen to forgo his right to exclude the police from the place
they seek to search, it follows that his consent cannot be considered a
meaningful choice unless he knew that he could in fact exclude the police”).
2 Such advice is surely preferable to an officer’s expression of his or her
desire to enter and to search in words that may be construed either as a
command or a question. See id., at 275–276 (Douglas, J., dissenting) (not
ing that “ ‘[u]nder many circumstances a reasonable person might read an
officer’s “May I” as the courteous expression of a demand backed by force
of law’ ” (quoting Bustamonte v. Schneckloth, 448 F. 2d 699, 701 (CA9
1971))).

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125 Cite as: 547 U. S. 103 (2006)
Breyer, J., concurring
the male and the female are equal partners. Reed v. Reed,
404 U. S. 71 (1971).
In today’s world the only advice that an officer could prop
erly give should make it clear that each of the partners has
a constitutional right that he or she may independently as
sert or waive. Assuming that both spouses are competent,
neither one is a master possessing the power to override the
other’s constitutional right to deny entry to their castle.
With these observations, I join the Court’s opinion.
Justice Breyer, concurring.
If Fourth Amendment law forced us to choose between
two bright-line rules, (1) a rule that always found one ten
ant’s consent sufficient to justify a search without a warrant
and (2) a rule that never did, I believe we should choose the
first. That is because, as The Chief Justice’s dissent
points out, a rule permitting such searches can serve impor
tant law enforcement needs (for example, in domestic abuse
cases), and the consenting party’s joint tenancy diminishes
the objecting party’s reasonable expectation of privacy.
But the Fourth Amendment does not insist upon bright
line rules. Rather, it recognizes that no single set of legal
rules can capture the ever-changing complexity of human
life. It consequently uses the general terms “unreasonable
searches and seizures.” And this Court has continuously
emphasized that “[r]easonableness . . . is measured . . .
by examining the totality of the circumstances.” Ohio v.
Robinette, 519 U. S. 33, 39 (1996); see also Illinois v.
Wardlow, 528 U. S. 119, 136 (2000) (Stevens, J., concurring
in part and dissenting in part); Florida v. Bostick, 501 U. S.
429, 439 (1991); Michigan v. Chesternut, 486 U. S. 567, 572–
573 (1988); Florida v. Royer, 460 U. S. 491, 506 (1983) (plural
ity opinion).
The circumstances here include the following: The search
at issue was a search solely for evidence. The objecting

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126 GEORGIA v. RANDOLPH
Breyer, J., concurring
party was present and made his objection known clearly and
directly to the officers seeking to enter the house. The offi
cers did not justify their search on grounds of possible evi
dence destruction. Cf. Thornton v. United States, 541 U. S.
615, 620–622 (2004); Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’
Assn., 489 U. S. 602, 623 (1989); Schmerber v. California, 384
U. S. 757, 770–771 (1966). And, as far as the record reveals,
the officers might easily have secured the premises and
sought a warrant permitting them to enter. See Illinois v.
McArthur, 531 U. S. 326 (2001). Thus, the “totality of the
circumstances” present here do not suffice to justify aban
doning the Fourth Amendment’s traditional hostility to po
lice entry into a home without a warrant.
I stress the totality of the circumstances, however, be
cause, were the circumstances to change significantly, so
should the result. The Court’s opinion does not apply where
the objector is not present “and object[ing].” Ante, at 121.
Moreover, the risk of an ongoing crime or other exigent
circumstance can make a critical difference. Consider, for
example, instances of domestic abuse. See ante, at 117–118.
“Family disturbance calls . . . constitute the largest single
category of calls received by police departments each year.”
Mederer & Gelles, Compassion or Control: Intervention in
Cases of Wife Abuse, 4 J. of Interpersonal Violence 25 (Mar.
1989) (emphasis deleted); see also, e. g., Office of the Attor
ney General, California Criminal Justice Statistics Cen
ter, Domestic Violence Related Calls for Assistance, 1987–
2003, County by Year, http://ag.ca.gov/cjsc/publications/misc/
dvsr/tabs/ 8703.pdf (as visited Mar. 1, 2006, and available in
Clerk of Court’s case file) (providing data showing that Cali
fornia police received an average of 207,848 domestic vio
lence related calls each year); Cessato, Defenders Against
Domestic Abuse, Washington Post, Aug. 25, 2002, p. B8 (“In
the District [of Columbia], police report that almost half of
roughly 39,000 violent crime calls received in 2000 involved
domestic violence”); Zorza, Women Battering: High Costs

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127 Cite as: 547 U. S. 103 (2006)
Roberts, C. J., dissenting
and the State of the Law, Clearinghouse Review 383, 385
(Special Issue 1994) (“One-third of all police time is spent
responding to domestic disturbance calls”). And, law en
forcement officers must be able to respond effectively when
confronted with the possibility of abuse.
If a possible abuse victim invites a responding officer to
enter a home or consents to the officer’s entry request, that
invitation (or consent) itself could reflect the victim’s fear
about being left alone with an abuser. It could also indicate
the availability of evidence, in the form of an immediate will
ingness to speak, that might not otherwise exist. In that
context, an invitation (or consent) would provide a special
reason for immediate, rather than later, police entry. And,
entry following invitation or consent by one party ordinarily
would be reasonable even in the face of direct objection by
the other. That being so, contrary to The Chief Justice’s
suggestion, post, at 139, today’s decision will not adversely
affect ordinary law enforcement practices.
Given the case-specific nature of the Court’s holding, and
with these understandings, I join the Court’s holding and
its opinion.
Chief Justice Roberts, with whom Justice Scalia
joins, dissenting.
The Court creates constitutional law by surmising what is
typical when a social guest encounters an entirely atypical
situation. The rule the majority fashions does not imple
ment the high office of the Fourth Amendment to protect
privacy, but instead provides protection on a random and
happenstance basis, protecting, for example, a co-occupant
who happens to be at the front door when the other occupant
consents to a search, but not one napping or watching televi
sion in the next room. And the cost of affording such ran
dom protection is great, as demonstrated by the recurring
cases in which abused spouses seek to authorize police entry
into a home they share with a nonconsenting abuser.

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128 GEORGIA v. RANDOLPH
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The correct approach to the question presented is clearly
mapped out in our precedents: The Fourth Amendment pro
tects privacy. If an individual shares information, papers,
or places with another, he assumes the risk that the other
person will in turn share access to that information or those
papers or places with the government. And just as an indi
vidual who has shared illegal plans or incriminating docu
ments with another cannot interpose an objection when that
other person turns the information over to the government,
just because the individual happens to be present at the time,
so too someone who shares a place with another cannot inter
pose an objection when that person decides to grant access
to the police, simply because the objecting individual hap
pens to be present.
A warrantless search is reasonable if police obtain the
voluntary consent of a person authorized to give it. Co
occupants have “assumed the risk that one of their number
might permit [a] common area to be searched.” United
States v. Matlock, 415 U. S. 164, 171, n. 7 (1974). Just as
Mrs. Randolph could walk upstairs, come down, and turn her
husband’s cocaine straw over to the police, she can consent
to police entry and search of what is, after all, her home, too.
I
In Illinois v. Rodriguez, 497 U. S. 177 (1990), this Court
stated that “[w]hat [a person] is assured by the Fourth
Amendment . . . is not that no government search of
his house will occur unless he consents; but that no such
search will occur that is ‘unreasonable.’ ” Id., at 183. One
element that can make a warrantless government search of
a home “ ‘reasonable’ ” is voluntary consent. Id., at 184;
Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U. S. 218, 219 (1973). Proof
of voluntary consent “is not limited to proof that consent was
given by the defendant,” but the government “may show
that permission to search was obtained from a third party
who possessed common authority over or other sufficient re

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129 Cite as: 547 U. S. 103 (2006)
Roberts, C. J., dissenting
lationship to the premises.” Matlock, supra, at 171. To
day’s opinion creates an exception to this otherwise clear
rule: A third-party consent search is unreasonable, and
therefore constitutionally impermissible, if the co-occupant
against whom evidence is obtained was present and objected
to the entry and search.
This exception is based on what the majority describes as
“widely shared social expectations” that “when people living
together disagree over the use of their common quarters,
a resolution must come through voluntary accommodation.”
Ante, at 111, 113–114. But this fundamental predicate to
the majority’s analysis gets us nowhere: Does the objecting
co-tenant accede to the consenting co-tenant’s wishes, or the
other way around? The majority’s assumption about volun
tary accommodation simply leads to the common stalemate
of two gentlemen insisting that the other enter a room first.
Nevertheless, the majority is confident in assuming—con
fident enough to incorporate its assumption into the Consti
tution—that an invited social guest who arrives at the door
of a shared residence, and is greeted by a disagreeable co
occupant shouting “ ‘stay out,’ ” would simply go away.
Ante, at 113. The Court observes that “no sensible person
would go inside under those conditions,” ibid., and concludes
from this that the inviting co-occupant has no “authority” to
insist on getting her way over the wishes of her co-occupant,
ante, at 114. But it seems equally accurate to say—based
on the majority’s conclusion that one does not have a right
to prevail over the express wishes of his co-occupant—that
the objector has no “authority” to insist on getting his way
over his co-occupant’s wish that her guest be admitted.
The fact is that a wide variety of differing social situations
can readily be imagined, giving rise to quite different social
expectations. A relative or good friend of one of two feud
ing roommates might well enter the apartment over the
objection of the other roommate. The reason the invitee

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130 GEORGIA v. RANDOLPH
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appeared at the door also affects expectations: A guest who
came to celebrate an occupant’s birthday, or one who had
traveled some distance for a particular reason, might not
readily turn away simply because of a roommate’s objection.
The nature of the place itself is also pertinent: Invitees may
react one way if the feuding roommates share one room, dif
ferently if there are common areas from which the objecting
roommate could readily be expected to absent himself. Al
tering the numbers might well change the social expec
tations: Invitees might enter if two of three co-occupants
encourage them to do so, over one dissenter.
The possible scenarios are limitless, and slight variations
in the fact pattern yield vastly different expectations about
whether the invitee might be expected to enter or to go
away. Such shifting expectations are not a promising foun
dation on which to ground a constitutional rule, particularly
because the majority has no support for its basic assump
tion—that an invited guest encountering two disagreeing
co-occupants would flee—beyond a hunch about how people
would typically act in an atypical situation.
And in fact the Court has not looked to such expectations
to decide questions of consent under the Fourth Amendment,
but only to determine when a search has occurred and
whether a particular person has standing to object to a
search. For these latter inquiries, we ask whether a person
has a subjective expectation of privacy in a particular place,
and whether “the expectation [is] one that society is pre
pared to recognize as ‘reasonable.’ ” Katz v. United States,
389 U. S. 347, 361 (1967) (Harlan, J., concurring); see Minne
sota v. Olson, 495 U. S. 91, 95–96, 100 (1990) (extending Katz
test to standing inquiry). But the social expectations con
cept has not been applied to all questions arising under the
Fourth Amendment, least of all issues of consent. A crimi
nal might have a strong expectation that his longtime confi
dant will not allow the government to listen to their private
conversations, but however profound his shock might be

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upon betrayal, government monitoring with the confidant’s
consent is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. See
United States v. White, 401 U. S. 745, 752 (1971) (plurality
opinion).
The majority suggests that “widely shared social expecta
tions” are a “constant element in assessing Fourth Amend
ment reasonableness,” ante, at 111 (citing Rakas v. Illinois,
439 U. S. 128, 144, n. 12 (1978)), but that is not the case; the
Fourth Amendment precedents the majority cites refer in
stead to a “legitimate expectation of privacy,” id., at 143,
n. 12 (emphasis added; internal quotation marks omitted).
Whatever social expectation the majority seeks to protect, it
is not one of privacy. The very predicate giving rise to the
question in cases of shared information, papers, containers,
or places is that privacy has been shared with another. Our
common social expectations may well be that the other per
son will not, in turn, share what we have shared with them
with another—including the police—but that is the risk we
take in sharing. If two friends share a locker and one keeps
contraband inside, he might trust that his friend will not let
others look inside. But by sharing private space, privacy
has “already been frustrated” with respect to the locker
mate. United States v. Jacobsen, 466 U. S. 109, 117 (1984).
If two roommates share a computer and one keeps pirated
software on a shared drive, he might assume that his room
mate will not inform the government. But that person has
given up his privacy with respect to his roommate by saving
the software on their shared computer.
A wide variety of often subtle social conventions may
shape expectations about how we act when another shares
with us what is otherwise private, and those conventions go
by a variety of labels—courtesy, good manners, custom, pro
tocol, even honor among thieves. The Constitution, how
ever, protects not these but privacy, and once privacy has
been shared, the shared information, documents, or places
remain private only at the discretion of the confidant.

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II
Our cases reflect this understanding. In United States v.
White, we held that one party to a conversation can consent
to government eavesdropping, and statements made by the
other party will be admissible at trial. 401 U. S., at 752.
This rule is based on privacy: “Inescapably, one contemplat
ing illegal activities must realize and risk that his compan
ions may be reporting to the police. . . . [I]f he has no doubts,
or allays them, or risks what doubt he has, the risk is his.”
Ibid.
The Court has applied this same analysis to objects and
places as well. In Frazier v. Cupp, 394 U. S. 731 (1969), a
duffel bag “was being used jointly” by two cousins. Id., at
740. The Court held that the consent of one was effective
to result in the seizure of evidence used against both: “[I]n
allowing [his cousin] to use the bag and in leaving it in his
house, [the defendant] must be taken to have assumed the
risk that [his cousin] would allow someone else to look in
side.” Ibid.
As the Court explained in United States v. Jacobsen,
supra:
“It is well settled that when an individual reveals pri
vate information to another, he assumes the risk that
his confidant will reveal that information to the authori
ties, and if that occurs the Fourth Amendment does not
prohibit governmental use of that information. Once
frustration of the original expectation of privacy occurs,
the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit governmental
use of the now nonprivate information: ‘This Court has
held repeatedly that the Fourth Amendment does not
prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third
party and conveyed by him to Government authorities,
even if the information is revealed on the assumption
that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the
confidence placed in a third party will not be betrayed.’ ”

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Id., at 117 (quoting United States v. Miller, 425 U. S.
435, 443 (1976)).
The same analysis applies to the question whether our pri
vacy can be compromised by those with whom we share com
mon living space. If a person keeps contraband in common
areas of his home, he runs the risk that his co-occupants will
deliver the contraband to the police. In Coolidge v. New
Hampshire, 403 U. S. 443 (1971), Mrs. Coolidge retrieved
four of her husband’s guns and the clothes he was wearing
the previous night and handed them over to police. We held
that these items were properly admitted at trial because
“when Mrs. Coolidge of her own accord produced the guns
and clothes for inspection, . . . it was not incumbent on the
police to stop her or avert their eyes.” Id., at 489.
Even in our most private relationships, our observable ac
tions and possessions are private at the discretion of those
around us. A husband can request that his wife not tell a
jury about contraband that she observed in their home or
illegal activity to which she bore witness, but it is she who
decides whether to invoke the testimonial marital privilege.
Trammel v. United States, 445 U. S. 40, 53 (1980). In Tram
mel, we noted that the former rule prohibiting a wife from
testifying about her husband’s observable wrongdoing at his
say-so “goes far beyond making ‘every man’s house his cas
tle,’ and permits a person to convert his house into ‘a den of
thieves.’ ” Id., at 51–52 (quoting 5 J. Bentham, Rationale of
Judicial Evidence 340 (1827)).
There is no basis for evaluating physical searches of shared
space in a manner different from how we evaluated the pri
vacy interests in the foregoing cases, and in fact the Court
has proceeded along the same lines in considering such
searches. In Matlock, police arrested the defendant in the
front yard of a house and placed him in a squad car, and
then obtained permission from Mrs. Graff to search a shared
bedroom for evidence of Matlock’s bank robbery. 415 U. S.,
at 166. Police certainly could have assumed that Matlock

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would have objected were he consulted as he sat handcuffed
in the squad car outside. And in Rodriguez, where Miss
Fischer offered to facilitate the arrest of her sleeping boy
friend by admitting police into an apartment she apparently
shared with him, 497 U. S., at 179, police might have noted
that this entry was undoubtedly contrary to Rodriguez’s so
cial expectations. Yet both of these searches were reason
able under the Fourth Amendment because Mrs. Graff had
authority, and Miss Fischer apparent authority, to admit oth
ers into areas over which they exercised control, despite the
almost certain wishes of their present co-occupants.
The common thread in our decisions upholding searches
conducted pursuant to third-party consent is an understand
ing that a person “assume[s] the risk” that those who have
access to and control over his shared property might consent
to a search. Matlock, 415 U. S., at 171, n. 7. In Matlock,
we explained that this assumption of risk is derived from a
third party’s “joint access or control for most purposes” of
shared property. Ibid. And we concluded that shared use
of property makes it “reasonable to recognize that any of the
co-inhabitants has the right to permit the inspection in his
own right.” Ibid.
In this sense, the risk assumed by a joint occupant is com
parable to the risk assumed by one who reveals private infor
mation to another. If a person has incriminating informa
tion, he can keep it private in the face of a request from
police to share it, because he has that right under the Fifth
Amendment. If a person occupies a house with incriminat
ing information in it, he can keep that information private in
the face of a request from police to search the house, because
he has that right under the Fourth Amendment. But if he
shares the information—or the house—with another, that
other can grant access to the police in each instance.1
1 The majority considers this comparison to be a “false equation,” and
even discerns “a deliberate intent to devalue the importance of the privacy
of a dwelling place.” Ante, at 115, n. 4. But the differences between the

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To the extent a person wants to ensure that his posses
sions will be subject to a consent search only due to his own
consent, he is free to place these items in an area over which
others do not share access and control, be it a private room
or a locked suitcase under a bed. Mr. Randolph acknowl
edged this distinction in his motion to suppress, where he
differentiated his law office from the rest of the Randolph
house by describing it as an area that “was solely in his con
trol and dominion.” App. 3. As to a “common area,” how
ever, co-occupants with “joint access or control” may consent
to an entry and search. Matlock, supra, at 171, n. 7.
By emphasizing the objector’s presence and noting an oc
cupant’s understanding that obnoxious guests might “be ad
mitted in [one’s] absence,” ante, at 111, the majority appears
to resurrect an agency theory of consent suggested in our
early cases. See Stoner v. California, 376 U. S. 483, 489
(1964) (stating that a hotel clerk could not consent to a search
of a guest’s room because the guest had not waived his rights
majority and this dissent reduce to this: Under the majority’s view, police
may not enter and search when an objecting co-occupant is present at the
door, but they may do so when he is asleep in the next room; under our
view, the co-occupant’s consent is effective in both cases. It seems a bit
overwrought to characterize the former approach as affording great pro
tection to a man in his castle, the latter as signaling that “the centuries of
special protection for the privacy of the home are over.” Ibid. The
Court in United States v. Matlock, 415 U. S. 164 (1974), drew the same
comparison the majority faults today, see id., at 171, n. 7, and the “deliber
ate intent” the majority ascribes to this dissent is apparently shared by
all Courts of Appeals and the great majority of State Supreme Courts to
have considered the question, see ante, at 108–109, n. 1.
The majority also mischaracterizes this dissent as assuming that “pri
vacy shared with another individual is privacy waived for all purposes
including warrantless searches by the police.” Ante, at 115, n. 4. The
point, of course, is not that a person waives his privacy by sharing space
with others such that police may enter at will, but that sharing space
necessarily entails a limited yielding of privacy to the person with whom
the space is shared, such that the other person shares authority to consent
to a search of the shared space. See supra, at 128, 132–136.

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“by word or deed, either directly or through an agent”);
Chapman v. United States, 365 U. S. 610, 616–617 (1961).
This agency theory is belied by the facts of Matlock and
Rodriguez—both defendants were present but simply not
asked for consent—and the Court made clear in those cases
that a co-occupant’s authority to consent rested not on an
absent occupant’s delegation of choice to an agent, but on
the consenting co-occupant’s “joint access or control” of the
property. Matlock, supra, at 171, n. 7; see Rodriguez,
supra, at 181; United States v. McAlpine, 919 F. 2d 1461,
1464, n. 2 (CA10 1990) (“[A]gency analysis [was] put to rest
by the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Matlock”).
The law acknowledges that although we might not expect
our friends and family to admit the government into common
areas, sharing space entails risk. A person assumes the risk
that his co-occupants—just as they might report his illegal
activity or deliver his contraband to the government—might
consent to a search of areas over which they have access and
control. See United States v. Karo, 468 U. S. 705, 726 (1984)
(O’Connor, J., concurring in part and concurring in judg
ment) (finding it a “relatively easy case . . . when two persons
share identical, overlapping privacy interests in a particu
lar place, container, or conversation. Here both share the
power to surrender each other’s privacy to a third party”).
III
The majority states its rule as follows: “[A] warrantless
search of a shared dwelling for evidence over the express
refusal of consent by a physically present resident cannot be
justified as reasonable as to him on the basis of consent given
to the police by another resident.” Ante, at 120.
Just as the source of the majority’s rule is not privacy, so
too the interest it protects cannot reasonably be described
as such. That interest is not protected if a co-owner hap
pens to be absent when the police arrive, in the backyard
gardening, asleep in the next room, or listening to music

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through earphones so that only his co-occupant hears the
knock on the door. That the rule is so random in its applica
tion confirms that it bears no real relation to the privacy
protected by the Fourth Amendment. What the majority’s
rule protects is not so much privacy as the good luck of a
co-owner who just happens to be present at the door when
the police arrive. Usually when the development of Fourth
Amendment jurisprudence leads to such arbitrary lines, we
take it as a signal that the rules need to be rethought. See
California v. Acevedo, 500 U. S. 565, 574, 580 (1991). We
should not embrace a rule at the outset that its sponsors
appreciate will result in drawing fine, formalistic lines. See
ante, at 121.
Rather than draw such random and happenstance lines—
and pretend that the Constitution decreed them—the more
reasonable approach is to adopt a rule acknowledging that
shared living space entails a limited yielding of privacy to
others, and that the law historically permits those to whom
we have yielded our privacy to in turn cooperate with the
government. Such a rule flows more naturally from our
cases concerning Fourth Amendment reasonableness and
is logically grounded in the concept of privacy underlying
that Amendment.
The scope of the majority’s rule is not only arbitrary but
obscure as well. The majority repeats several times that a
present co-occupant’s refusal to permit entry renders the
search unreasonable and invalid “as to him.” Ante, at 106,
120, 122. This implies entry and search would be reasonable
“as to” someone else, presumably the consenting co-occupant
and any other absent co-occupants. The normal Fourth
Amendment rule is that items discovered in plain view are
admissible if the officers were legitimately on the prem
ises; if the entry and search were reasonable “as to”
Mrs. Randolph, based on her consent, it is not clear why the
cocaine straw should not be admissible “as to” Mr. Randolph,
as discovered in plain view during a legitimate search “as

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to” Mrs. Randolph. The majority’s differentiation between
entry focused on discovering whether domestic violence has
occurred (and the consequent authority to seize items in
plain view), and entry focused on searching for evidence of
other crime, is equally puzzling. See ante, at 118–119.
This Court has rejected subjective motivations of police of
ficers in assessing Fourth Amendment questions, see Whren
v. United States, 517 U. S. 806, 812–813 (1996), with good
reason: The police do not need a particular reason to ask for
consent to search, whether for signs of domestic violence or
evidence of drug possession.
While the majority’s rule protects something random, its
consequences are particularly severe. The question pre
sented often arises when innocent co-tenants seek to disasso
ciate or protect themselves from ongoing criminal activity.
See, e. g., United States v. Hendrix, 595 F. 2d 883, 884 (CADC
1979) (per curiam) (wife asked police “ ‘to get her baby and
take [a] sawed-off shotgun out of her house’ ”); People v.
Cosme, 48 N. Y. 2d 286, 288–289, 293, 397 N. E. 2d 1319, 1320,
1323 (1979) (woman asked police to remove cocaine and a gun
from a shared closet); United States v. Botsch, 364 F. 2d 542,
547 (CA2 1966). Under the majority’s rule, there will be
many cases in which a consenting co-occupant’s wish to have
the police enter is overridden by an objection from another
present co-occupant. What does the majority imagine will
happen, in a case in which the consenting co-occupant is con
cerned about the other’s criminal activity, once the door
clicks shut? The objecting co-occupant may pause briefly to
decide whether to destroy any evidence of wrongdoing or to
inflict retribution on the consenting co-occupant first, but
there can be little doubt that he will attend to both in short
order. It is no answer to say that the consenting co
occupant can depart with the police; remember that it is her
home, too, and the other co-occupant’s very presence, which
allowed him to object, may also prevent the consenting co
occupant from doing more than urging the police to enter.

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Perhaps the most serious consequence of the majority’s
rule is its operation in domestic abuse situations, a context
in which the present question often arises. See Rodriguez,
497 U. S., at 179; United States v. Donlin, 982 F. 2d 31 (CA1
1992); Hendrix, supra; People v. Sanders, 904 P. 2d 1311
(Colo. 1995) (en banc); Brandon v. State, 778 P. 2d 221 (Alaska
App. 1989). While people living together might typically be
accommodating to the wishes of their co-tenants, requests
for police assistance may well come from co-inhabitants who
are having a disagreement. The Court concludes that be
cause “no sensible person would go inside” in the face of dis
puted consent, ante, at 113, and the consenting co-tenant
thus has “no recognized authority” to insist on the guest’s
admission, ante, at 114, a “police officer [has] no better claim
to reasonableness in entering than the officer would have in
the absence of any consent at all,” ibid. But the police offi
cer’s superior claim to enter is obvious: Mrs. Randolph did
not invite the police to join her for dessert and coffee; the
officer’s precise purpose in knocking on the door was to as
sist with a dispute between the Randolphs—one in which
Mrs. Randolph felt the need for the protective presence of
the police. The majority’s rule apparently forbids police
from entering to assist with a domestic dispute if the abuser
whose behavior prompted the request for police assistance
objects.2
2 In response to this concern, the majority asserts that its rule applies
“merely [to] evidentiary searches.” Ante, at 119. But the fundamental
premise of the majority’s argument is that an inviting co-occupant has “no
recognized authority” to “open the door” over a co-occupant’s objection.
Ante, at 114; see also ante, at 106 (“[A] physically present co-occupant’s
stated refusal to permit entry prevails, rendering the warrantless search
unreasonable and invalid as to him” (emphasis added)); ante, at 113 (“[A]
caller standing at the door of shared premises would have no confidence . . .
to enter when a fellow tenant stood there saying ‘stay out’ ” (emphasis
added)); ante, at 114 (“[A] disputed invitation, without more, gives a police
officer no . . . claim to reasonableness in entering” (emphasis added)). The
point is that the majority’s rule transforms what may have begun as a

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The majority acknowledges these concerns, but dismisses
them on the ground that its rule can be expected to give rise
to exigent situations, and police can then rely on an exigent
circumstances exception to justify entry. Ante, at 116–117,
n. 6. This is a strange way to justify a rule, and the fact
that alternative justifications for entry might arise does not
show that entry pursuant to consent is unreasonable. In ad
dition, it is far from clear that an exception for emergency
entries suffices to protect the safety of occupants in domestic
disputes. See, e. g., United States v. Davis, 290 F. 3d 1239,
1240–1241 (CA10 2002) (finding no exigent circumstances jus
tifying entry when police responded to a report of domestic
abuse, officers heard no noise upon arrival, defendant told
officers that his wife was out of town, and wife then appeared
at the door seemingly unharmed but resisted husband’s ef
forts to close the door).
Rather than give effect to a consenting spouse’s authority
to permit entry into her house to avoid such situations, the
majority again alters established Fourth Amendment rules
to defend giving veto power to the objecting spouse. In re
sponse to the concern that police might be turned away
under its rule before entry can be justified based on exi
gency, the majority creates a new rule: A “good reason”
to enter, coupled with one occupant’s consent, will ensure
that a police officer is “lawfully in the premises.” Ante, at
118. As support for this “consent plus a good reason” rule,
the majority cites a treatise, which itself refers only to
emergency entries. Ibid. (citing 4 W. LaFave, Search and
Seizure § 8.3(d), p. 161 (4th ed. 2004)). For the sake of de
fending what it concedes are fine, formalistic lines, the ma
request for consent to conduct an evidentiary search into something else
altogether, by giving veto power over the consenting co-occupant’s wishes
to an occupant who would exclude the police from entry. The majority
would afford the now quite vulnerable consenting co-occupant sufficient
time to gather her belongings and leave, see ante, at 118, apparently put
ting to one side the fact that it is her castle, too.

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jority spins out an entirely new framework for analyzing exi
gent circumstances. Police may now enter with a “good
reason” to believe that “violence (or threat of violence) has
just occurred or is about to (or soon will) occur.” Ante, at
118. And apparently a key factor allowing entry with a
“good reason” short of exigency is the very consent of one
co-occupant the majority finds so inadequate in the first
place.
The majority’s analysis alters a great deal of established
Fourth Amendment law. The majority imports the concept
of “social expectations,” previously used only to determine
when a search has occurred and whether a particular person
has standing to object to a search, into questions of consent.
Ante, at 111, 113. To determine whether entry and search
are reasonable, the majority considers a police officer’s sub
jective motive in asking for consent, which we have other
wise refrained from doing in assessing Fourth Amendment
questions. Ante, at 118. And the majority creates a new
exception to the warrant requirement to justify warrantless
entry short of exigency in potential domestic abuse situa
tions. Ibid.
Considering the majority’s rule is solely concerned with
protecting a person who happens to be present at the door
when a police officer asks his co-occupant for consent to
search, but not one who is asleep in the next room or in the
backyard gardening, the majority has taken a great deal of
pain in altering Fourth Amendment doctrine, for precious
little (if any) gain in privacy. Perhaps one day, as the conse
quences of the majority’s analytic approach become clearer,
today’s opinion will be treated the same way the majority
treats our opinions in Matlock and Rodriguez—as a “loose
end” to be tied up. Ante, at 121.
One of the concurring opinions states that if it had to
choose between a rule that a co-tenant’s consent was valid
or a rule that it was not, it would choose the former. Ante,
at 125 (opinion of Breyer, J.). The concurrence advises,

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however, that “no single set of legal rules can capture the
ever-changing complexity of human life,” ibid., and joins
what becomes the majority opinion, “[g]iven the case-specific
nature of the Court’s holding,” ante, at 127. What the ma
jority establishes, in its own terms, is “the rule that a physi
cally present inhabitant’s express refusal of consent to a po
lice search is dispositive as to him, regardless of the consent
of a fellow occupant.” Ante, at 122–123 (emphasis added).
The concurrence joins with the apparent “understandin[g]”
that the majority’s “rule” is not a rule at all, but simply a
“case-specific” holding. Ante, at 127 (opinion of Breyer, J.).
The end result is a complete lack of practical guidance for
the police in the field, let alone for the lower courts.
* * *
Our third-party consent cases have recognized that a per
son who shares common areas with others “assume[s] the
risk that one of their number might permit the common area
to be searched.” Matlock, 415 U. S., at 171, n. 7. The ma
jority reminds us, in high tones, that a man’s home is his
castle, ante, at 115, but even under the majority’s rule, it is
not his castle if he happens to be absent, asleep in the keep,
or otherwise engaged when the constable arrives at the gate.
Then it is his co-owner’s castle. And, of course, it is not his
castle if he wants to consent to entry, but his co-owner ob
jects. Rather than constitutionalize such an arbitrary rule,
we should acknowledge that a decision to share a private
place, like a decision to share a secret or a confidential docu
ment, necessarily entails the risk that those with whom we
share may in turn choose to share—for their own protection
or for other reasons—with the police.
I respectfully dissent.
Justice Scalia, dissenting.
I join the dissent of The Chief Justice, but add these
few words in response to Justice Stevens’ concurrence.

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It is not as clear to me as it is to Justice Stevens that,
at the time the Fourth Amendment was adopted, a police
officer could enter a married woman’s home over her objec
tion, and could not enter with only her consent. Nor is it
clear to me that the answers to these questions depended
solely on who owned the house. It is entirely clear, how
ever, that if the matter did depend solely on property rights,
a latter-day alteration of property rights would also produce
a latter-day alteration of the Fourth Amendment outcome—
without altering the Fourth Amendment itself.
Justice Stevens’ attempted critique of originalism con
fuses the original import of the Fourth Amendment with the
background sources of law to which the Amendment, on its
original meaning, referred. From the date of its ratification
until well into the 20th century, violation of the Amendment
was tied to common-law trespass. See Kyllo v. United
States, 533 U. S. 27, 31–32 (2001); see also California v.
Acevedo, 500 U. S. 565, 581, 583 (1991) (Scalia, J., concurring
in judgment). On the basis of that connection, someone who
had power to license the search of a house by a private party
could authorize a police search. See 1 Restatement of Torts
§ 167, and Comment b (1934); see also Williams v. Howard,
110 S. C. 82, 96 S. E. 251 (1918); Fennemore v. Armstrong,
29 Del. 35, 96 A. 204 (Super. Ct. 1915). The issue of who
could give such consent generally depended, in turn, on “his
torical and legal refinements” of property law. United
States v. Matlock, 415 U. S. 164, 171, n. 7 (1974). As prop
erty law developed, individuals who previously could not au
thorize a search might become able to do so, and those who
once could grant such consent might no longer have that
power. But changes in the law of property to which the
Fourth Amendment referred would not alter the Amend
ment’s meaning: that anyone capable of authorizing a search
by a private party could consent to a warrantless search by
the police.

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144 GEORGIA v. RANDOLPH
Scalia, J., dissenting
There is nothing new or surprising in the proposition that
our unchanging Constitution refers to other bodies of law
that might themselves change. The Fifth Amendment pro
vides, for instance, that “private property” shall not “be
taken for public use, without just compensation”; but it does
not purport to define property rights. We have consistently
held that “the existence of a property interest is determined
by reference to ‘existing rules or understandings that stem
from an independent source such as state law.’ ” Phillips
v. Washington Legal Foundation, 524 U. S. 156, 164 (1998)
(quoting Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth, 408 U. S.
564, 577 (1972)). The same is true of the Fourteenth
Amendment Due Process Clause’s protection of “property.”
See Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U. S. 748, 756 (2005). This
reference to changeable law presents no problem for the
originalist. No one supposes that the meaning of the Con
stitution changes as States expand and contract property
rights. If it is indeed true, therefore, that a wife in 1791
could not authorize the search of her husband’s house, the
fact that current property law provides otherwise is no more
troublesome for the originalist than the well-established fact
that a State must compensate its takings of even those prop
erty rights that did not exist at the time of the founding.
In any event, Justice Stevens’ panegyric to the equal
rights of women under modern property law does not sup
port his conclusion that “[a]ssuming . . . both spouses are
competent, neither one is a master possessing the power to
override the other’s constitutional right to deny entry to
their castle.” Ante, at 125. The issue at hand is what to
do when there is a conflict between two equals. Now that
women have authority to consent, as Justice Stevens
claims men alone once did, it does not follow that the spouse
who refuses consent should be the winner of the contest.
Justice Stevens could just as well have followed the same
historical developments to the opposite conclusion: Now that

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145 Cite as: 547 U. S. 103 (2006)
Thomas, J., dissenting
“the male and the female are equal partners,” ibid., and
women can consent to a search of their property, men can no
longer obstruct their wishes. Men and women are no more
“equal” in the majority’s regime, where both sexes can veto
each other’s consent, than on the dissent’s view, where both
sexes cannot.
Finally, I must express grave doubt that today’s decision
deserves Justice Stevens’ celebration as part of the for
ward march of women’s equality. Given the usual patterns
of domestic violence, how often can police be expected to
encounter the situation in which a man urges them to enter
the home while a woman simultaneously demands that they
stay out? The most common practical effect of today’s deci
sion, insofar as the contest between the sexes is concerned,
is to give men the power to stop women from allowing police
into their homes—which is, curiously enough, precisely the
power that Justice Stevens disapprovingly presumes men
had in 1791.
Justice Thomas, dissenting.
The Court has long recognized that “[i]t is an act of re
sponsible citizenship for individuals to give whatever infor
mation they may have to aid in law enforcement.” Miranda
v. Arizona, 384 U. S. 436, 477–478 (1966). Consistent with
this principle, the Court held in Coolidge v. New Hampshire,
403 U. S. 443 (1971), that no Fourth Amendment search oc
curs where, as here, the spouse of an accused voluntarily
leads the police to potential evidence of wrongdoing by the
accused. Id., at 486–490. Because Coolidge squarely con
trols this case, the Court need not address whether police
could permissibly have conducted a general search of the
Randolph home, based on Mrs. Randolph’s consent. I re
spectfully dissent.
In the instant case, Mrs. Randolph told police responding
to a domestic dispute that respondent was using a substan

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146 GEORGIA v. RANDOLPH
Thomas, J., dissenting
tial quantity of cocaine. Upon police request, she consented
to a general search of her residence to investigate her state
ments. However, as the Court’s recitation of the facts dem
onstrates, ante, at 107, the record is clear that no such
general search occurred. Instead, Sergeant Brett Murray
asked Mrs. Randolph where the cocaine was located, and she
showed him to an upstairs bedroom, where he saw the “piece
of cut straw” on a dresser. Corrected Tr. of Motion to Sup
pression Hearing in Case No. 2001R–699 (Super. Ct. Sumter
Cty., Ga., Oct. 3, 2002), pp. 8–9. Upon closer examination,
Sergeant Murray observed white residue on the straw, and
concluded the straw had been used for ingesting cocaine.
Id., at 8. He then collected the straw and the residue as
evidence. Id., at 9.
Sergeant Murray’s entry into the Randolphs’ home at the
invitation of Mrs. Randolph to be shown evidence of respond
ent’s cocaine use does not constitute a Fourth Amendment
search. Under this Court’s precedents, only the action of an
agent of the government can constitute a search within the
meaning of the Fourth Amendment, because that Amend
ment “was intended as a restraint upon the activities of
sovereign authority, and was not intended to be a limita
tion upon other than governmental agencies.” Burdeau v.
McDowell, 256 U. S. 465, 475 (1921) (emphasis added). See
also Coolidge, 403 U. S., at 487. Applying this principle in
Coolidge, the Court held that when a citizen leads police of
ficers into a home shared with her spouse to show them evi
dence relevant to their investigation into a crime, that citizen
is not acting as an agent of the police, and thus no Fourth
Amendment search has occurred. Id., at 488–498.
Review of the facts in Coolidge clearly demonstrates that
it governs this case. While the police interrogated Coolidge
as part of their investigation into a murder, two other offi
cers were sent to his house to speak with his wife. Id., at
485. During the course of questioning Mrs. Coolidge, the

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147 Cite as: 547 U. S. 103 (2006)
Thomas, J., dissenting
police asked whether her husband owned any guns. Id., at
486. Mrs. Coolidge replied in the affirmative, and offered to
retrieve the weapons for the police, apparently operating
under the assumption that doing so would help to exonerate
her husband. Ibid. The police accompanied Mrs. Coolidge
to the bedroom to collect the guns, as well as clothing that
Mrs. Coolidge told them her husband had been wearing the
night of the murder. Ibid.
Before this Court, Coolidge argued that the evidence of
the guns and clothing should be suppressed as the product
of an unlawful search because Mrs. Coolidge was acting as
an “ ‘instrument,’ ” or agent, of the police by complying with
a “ ‘demand’ ” made by them. Id., at 487. The Court recog
nized that, had Mrs. Coolidge sought out the guns to give to
police wholly on her own initiative, “there can be no doubt
under existing law that the articles would later have been
admissible in evidence.” Ibid. That she did so in coopera
tion with police pursuant to their request did not transform
her into their agent; after all, “it is no part of the policy
underlying the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to dis
courage citizens from aiding to the utmost of their ability in
the apprehension of criminals.” Id., at 488. Because the
police were “acting normally and properly” when they asked
about any guns, and questioning Mrs. Coolidge about the
clothing was “logical and in no way coercive,” the Fourth
Amendment did not require police to “avert their eyes” when
Mrs. Coolidge produced the guns and clothes for inspection.1
Id., at 488–489.
1 Although the Court has described Coolidge as a “ ‘third party con
sent’ ” case, United States v. Matlock, 415 U. S. 164, 171 (1974), the Court’s
opinion, by its own terms, does not rest on its conception of Mrs. Coolidge’s
authority to consent to a search of her house or the possible relevance of
Mr. Coolidge’s absence from the scene. Coolidge, 403 U. S., at 487 (“[W]e
need not consider the petitioner’s further argument that Mrs. Coolidge
could not or did not ‘waive’ her husband’s constitutional protection against
unreasonable searches and seizures”). See also Walter v. United States,

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148 GEORGIA v. RANDOLPH
Thomas, J., dissenting
This case is indistinguishable from Coolidge, compelling
the conclusion that Mrs. Randolph was not acting as an agent
of the police when she admitted Sergeant Murray into her
home and led him to the incriminating evidence.2 Just as
Mrs. Coolidge could, of her own accord, have offered her hus
band’s weapons and clothing to the police without implicating
the Fourth Amendment, so too could Mrs. Randolph have
simply retrieved the straw from the house and given it to
Sergeant Murray. Indeed, the majority appears to concede
as much. Ante, at 116 (“The co-tenant acting on his own
initiative may be able to deliver evidence to the police,
Coolidge, supra, at 487–489 . . . , and can tell the police what
he knows, for use before a magistrate in getting a warrant”).
Drawing a constitutionally significant distinction between
what occurred here and Mrs. Randolph’s independent pro
duction of the relevant evidence is both inconsistent with
Coolidge and unduly formalistic.3
Accordingly, the trial court appropriately denied respond
ent’s motion to suppress the evidence Mrs. Randolph pro
447 U. S. 649, 660–661, n. 2 (1980) (White, J., concurring in part and concur
ring in judgment) (“Similarly, in Coolidge v. New Hampshire, the Court
held that a wife’s voluntary action in turning over to police her hus
band’s guns and clothing did not constitute a search and seizure by the
government”).
2 The Courts of Appeals have disagreed over the appropriate inquiry to
be performed in determining whether involvement of the police trans
forms a private individual into an agent or instrument of the police. See
United States v. Pervaz, 118 F. 3d 1, 5–6 (CA1 1997) (summarizing ap
proaches of various Circuits). The similarity between this case and
Coolidge avoids any need to resolve this broader dispute in the present
case.
3 That Sergeant Murray, unlike the officers in Coolidge, may have in
tended to perform a general search of the house is inconsequential, as he
ultimately did not do so; he viewed only those items shown to him by
Mrs. Randolph. Nor is it relevant that, while Mrs. Coolidge intended to
aid the police in apprehending a criminal because she believed doing so
would exonerate her husband, Mrs. Randolph believed aiding the police
would implicate her husband.

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149 Cite as: 547 U. S. 103 (2006)
Thomas, J., dissenting
vided to the police and the evidence obtained as a result of
the consequent search warrant. I would therefore reverse
the judgment of the Supreme Court of Georgia.