Lange v. California
The Supreme Court ruled that police officers have no automatic right to enter someone's home without a warrant simply because they were pursuing a misdemeanor suspect — officers must assess the specific circumstances of each chase to determine whether a genuine emergency exists.
The decision eliminates the blanket rule some states had applied, while confirming that warrantless entry is still allowed whenever a real emergency — such as the risk of violence, destruction of evidence, or the suspect escaping through a back door — is actually present.
“When the totality of circumstances shows an emergency—such as imminent harm to others, a threat to the officer himself, destruction of evidence, or escape from the home—the police may act without waiting.”
The majority's statement of when warrantless home entry remains permissible even under the new case-by-case standard.
How it got here: California state courts upheld the warrantless entry under a categorical hot-pursuit rule; the California Supreme Court denied review; the U.S. Supreme Court took the case to resolve a nationwide split.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Arthur Lange was driving home in Sonoma, California, playing loud music with his windows down and repeatedly honking his horn. A California Highway Patrol officer signaled him to pull over, but Lange — only about 100 feet from his house — drove into his driveway and into his attached garage. The officer followed him inside, observed signs of intoxication, and administered field sobriety tests. A blood test later showed Lange's blood-alcohol content was more than three times the legal limit. California charged him with misdemeanor DUI.
The question before the Court
When police are chasing someone who flees into their home, can they always enter without a warrant just because the suspected crime is a misdemeanor?
The Court's answer
No — the Court held that pursuing a suspected misdemeanant does not automatically create the kind of emergency that allows police to enter a home without a warrant. Misdemeanors range widely in seriousness, and the Court had previously held in Welsh v. Wisconsin that a minor offense alone rarely presents the urgency needed to justify skipping the warrant requirement. Adding the element of flight changes the calculation — but not enough to justify a blanket rule covering every misdemeanor chase.
Under the correct standard, officers must look at all the circumstances: the nature of the crime, the nature of the flight, and whatever else is happening around them. If those circumstances reveal a genuine emergency — imminent violence, the risk that evidence will be destroyed, or a real chance the suspect will escape through another exit — officers may enter without waiting for a warrant. But when no such emergency exists, the Constitution's protection of the home requires them to get one, even if the suspect has already retreated inside.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Police departments that had trained officers to treat any misdemeanor chase as automatic permission to enter a home must now require a case-by-case emergency assessment instead. People suspected of minor crimes gain a meaningful protection: unless the officer can point to a specific emergency, a warrant is required even after a foot or car chase ends at a front door.
What changes now
The case returns to the California courts, which must now decide whether the specific circumstances of Lange's short driveway chase — driving a hundred feet home after ignoring a police signal — amounted to a genuine emergency justifying warrantless entry into his garage. Lange is free to renew his argument that the evidence obtained after the officer entered should be suppressed. The broader ruling sets a new nationwide floor: case-by-case emergency analysis is required for all misdemeanor pursuit cases going forward.
What this does not decide
The ruling does not disturb the existing rule that police pursuing a fleeing felon may always enter a home without a warrant. It also does not decide whether the evidence in Lange's own case must be suppressed — that question goes back to the California courts — and it does not resolve the separate question of whether the federal exclusionary rule applies in misdemeanor-pursuit cases (addressed only in Justice Thomas's separate opinion).
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence in part — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas joined the majority opinion except for Part II-A, which analyzed the Court's prior precedents. He wrote separately to flag two points. First, history supports several categorical exceptions to the majority's general case-by-case rule — including warrantless entry when someone has been arrested and escapes, when officers are pursuing a person who committed a violent affray, or when they are pursuing someone whose conduct could escalate to a felony — and those historical exceptions should remain available. Second, even if a court on remand finds the entry here unlawful, the federal exclusionary rule (the remedy that bars evidence obtained through unconstitutional searches from being used at trial) likely does not apply in misdemeanor-flight cases, because excluding evidence would encourage suspects to flee and the costs of suppression outweigh any deterrence benefit.
Concurrence — Justice Kavanaugh
Justice Kavanaugh joined the majority opinion but wrote briefly to underscore that in practice there is almost no daylight between the majority's case-by-case approach and the Chief Justice's categorical approach. He noted that Lange's own lawyer conceded at oral argument that under the majority's rule, warrantless entry would still be permissible 'nine times out of ten or more' in misdemeanor-pursuit cases, because most such chases will involve at least one recognized emergency such as risk of escape, destruction of evidence, or harm to others. He also emphasized that today's ruling does not disturb the existing rule that pursuit of a fleeing felon is always an exigent circumstance justifying warrantless home entry.
Concurrence — Justice Roberts
Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justice Alito, agreed that the lower court's judgment should be vacated but would have adopted a different rule: that hot pursuit — flight from an officer who has signaled the suspect to stop — is itself an exigent circumstance justifying warrantless home entry, regardless of whether the underlying crime is a misdemeanor or a felony. In his view, it is the flight, not the nature of the offense, that has always been understood to justify entry, and the Court's decades of precedent consistently treated hot pursuit as a freestanding emergency, not merely a backdrop against which other emergencies might develop. He argued the majority's case-by-case rule is unworkable for officers in the field, dangerous because it requires split-second legal analysis while a chase is underway, and unsupported by the historical record, which in his reading approved warrantless pursuit into homes for a wide range of offenses at common law.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Fourth Amendment requires police to obtain a warrant before entering a home, but recognizes an exception for genuine emergencies — situations the Court calls 'exigent circumstances,' where the need for police action is so urgent that waiting for a warrant would cause real harm. The Court has always applied this exception by asking whether the specific facts of a given situation amounted to an emergency, not by declaring that certain categories of situations are always emergencies.
- The central question was whether misdemeanor pursuit should be treated as a special categorical exception — meaning any chase of a misdemeanor suspect would automatically qualify as an emergency, regardless of the actual facts. Some lower courts had adopted that rule; the California Court of Appeal applied it here.
- The Court rejected a categorical rule. Misdemeanors cover an enormous range of conduct, from violent assault to noise violations and littering. The Court had already held in Welsh v. Wisconsin (1984) that when only a minor offense is involved and no chase occurs, officers can usually take the time to get a warrant. Flight changes that picture — in many cases it does create an urgency — but nothing in the Court's precedents or logic supported treating every misdemeanor flight, no matter how minor the crime or how unthreatening the circumstances, as an automatic emergency.
- The Court also examined founding-era common law, which clearly allowed warrantless home entry when officers were pursuing a fleeing felon — but found no equivalent blanket rule for misdemeanors. Common law authorities allowed entry in misdemeanor cases only when specific circumstances, such as ongoing violence or conduct likely to lead to serious harm, supplied a genuine reason for urgency. That historical pattern matched the Court's modern case-by-case approach.
- Under the rule the Court adopted, officers can still make a warrantless entry in most misdemeanor-pursuit situations as long as actual emergency circumstances are present — such as the risk of violence, imminent destruction of evidence, or a suspect who might escape through a back door or another exit. Flight itself is one of the facts an officer can weigh, but it does not end the analysis.
- Because the California Court of Appeal had applied an all-or-nothing categorical rule without ever asking whether the specific facts of Lange's brief driveway chase created any real emergency, the lower court's judgment was set aside and the case sent back for that analysis.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes United States v. Santana (427 U. S. 38)
Santana's hot-pursuit rule was confined to fleeing felons and never established a blanket rule for misdemeanor suspects.
Reaffirms Welsh v. Wisconsin (466 U. S. 740)
Welsh's principle that minor offenses rarely create the kind of emergency justifying warrantless home entry is reaffirmed and extended to misdemeanor-pursuit cases.