City of L. A. v. Patel
The Supreme Court struck down a Los Angeles law that let police inspect hotel guest registers on demand, ruling that hotel operators must be given some chance to have a neutral decisionmaker review an officer's request before they can be punished for refusing.
The decision also settles a broader question: Fourth Amendment challenges to entire laws, not just to specific searches, are allowed and can succeed, opening the door to similar challenges against other warrantless-search ordinances nationwide.
“To be clear, we hold only that a hotel owner must be afforded an opportunity to have a neutral decisionmaker review an officer’s demand to search the registry before he or she faces penalties for failing to comply.”
The Court explains the narrow scope of its ruling requiring precompliance review.
How it got here: A federal trial court ruled for the City; the Ninth Circuit, sitting en banc, reversed and found the law unconstitutional; the City asked the Supreme Court to review that reversal.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Los Angeles required hotel operators to record detailed guest information and keep it on the premises for 90 days, and to hand those records over to any police officer who asked, on pain of arrest and criminal charges for refusing. A group of motel operators and a lodging association sued, arguing that letting police inspect their registers without a warrant or any chance to object violated the Fourth Amendment.
The question before the Court
Can a city force hotel operators to hand over their guest registers to police on demand, with no chance to get a judge or other neutral official to review the request first?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that letting police inspect hotel guest registers on demand, with no chance for the operator to have anyone review the request before facing arrest, violates the Fourth Amendment. The city's ordinance fell under the administrative-search exception to the warrant requirement, but even searches under that exception must give the business some opportunity for precompliance review before a neutral decisionmaker, such as a magistrate or judge reviewing a subpoena.
The Court also confirmed that businesses can bring a facial challenge attacking an entire law like this one, not just challenge a single search, rejecting the City's argument that such challenges must always fail. It further rejected the claim that hotels are a "closely regulated" industry entitled to looser Fourth Amendment rules, since nothing about running a hotel poses the kind of inherent danger that industries like mining or firearms dealing pose.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Cities across the country have similar hotel-registry inspection laws, and many will need to add a review step, like an administrative subpoena process, before officers can demand records on the spot. Hotel operators gain a way to object without risking arrest, while police keep tools like warrants, consent, and emergency searches to get records quickly when needed.
What changes now
The ruling is final on the merits; the Ninth Circuit's judgment finding the ordinance unconstitutional stands affirmed. Los Angeles can no longer enforce the on-demand inspection provision as written, though it may add a precompliance review mechanism, such as an administrative subpoena process, to keep enforcing its recordkeeping requirement. Police retain other tools, including warrants, consent, and exigent-circumstance searches.
What this does not decide
The Court stressed its holding is narrow: it does not question the requirement that hotels keep guest records, and it does not stop police from getting records through consent, a proper warrant, or an emergency exception. It only requires some opportunity to contest an officer's on-demand inspection request before punishment follows.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Scalia
“The Court reaches its wrongheaded conclusion not simply by misapplying our precedent, but by mistaking our precedent for the Fourth Amendment itself.”Scalia's central objection that the majority elevated administrative-search case law over the Constitution's text.
Justice Scalia argued the ordinance easily qualifies under the closely-regulated-industries exception, pointing to centuries of government oversight of inns and hotels and modern regulations reaching deep into their operations. He would have upheld the law because it serves a substantial interest in deterring crime, is necessary since criminals would otherwise falsify registers, and is narrowly limited to inspecting only the register in public areas.
Dissent — Justice Alito
Justice Alito argued the majority applied the wrong standard for facial challenges, since a law can only be struck down entirely if it is unconstitutional in every application. He offered five hypothetical scenarios, such as warrants, exigent circumstances, and consent situations, where the ordinance could constitutionally apply, and argued any Fourth Amendment problems should be handled through narrower as-applied challenges instead.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court first addressed whether a law itself, rather than just one specific search, can be challenged under the Fourth Amendment. It held that such 'facial' challenges are allowed, since the Court has entertained and even sustained similar challenges to other warrantless-search statutes in the past.
- When testing whether a law is unconstitutional in all its applications, the Court counts only situations where the law actually does the authorizing — not situations where a search would happen anyway because of consent, a warrant, or an emergency. Those situations don't count as 'applications' of the ordinance at all.
- Turning to the merits, the Court applied the administrative-search exception, which lets government inspect certain regulated activity without the usual warrant and probable-cause requirements. To satisfy the Fourth Amendment, this kind of search still requires that the business be given a chance for precompliance review — an opportunity to have a neutral decisionmaker check the search request before facing punishment for refusing.
- Because the Los Angeles ordinance let police demand hotel records on the spot and arrest an operator immediately for refusing, with no opportunity to have anyone review that demand first, the law failed this basic requirement.
- The Court also rejected the argument that hotels count as a 'closely regulated industry,' a narrow category (so far limited to businesses like liquor sales, firearms dealing, mining, and junkyards) subject to a looser search standard, because nothing about running a hotel poses the kind of inherent public-safety risk those industries pose.
- Even assuming hotels were closely regulated, the ordinance still failed because it lacked any limits on how often or under what circumstances police could search, so it did not serve as an adequate substitute for a warrant.