In this case, the United States Supreme Court ultimately concluded that a Los Angeles ordinance that required hotel owners to make guest registries available to the police upon request violated the owners’ Fourth Amendment rights. But, of equal importance, the Court clarified a key issue: Facial challenges can be brought under the Fourth Amendment.
The ordinance at issue required “‘every operator of a hotel to keep a record’ containing specified information concerning guests and to make this record ‘available to any officer of the Los Angeles Police Department for inspection’ on demand.” A hotel owner who refuses to grant an officer access to the registry can be arrested on the spot, and faces potential jail time and a fine. A group of motel operators and a lodging association filed this lawsuit, arguing that the compelled disclosure constituted an unconstitutional warrantless search under the Fourth Amendment. They asserted a “facial challenge,” meaning that they were attacking the ordinance itself, as opposed to an “as applied” challenge, meaning an attack on the ordinance’s application to a particular set of circumstances. Although past cases seemed to indicate that facial challenges could not be brought under the Fourth Amendment, the Court clarified that such challenges were not “categorically barred or especially disfavored,” citing numerous prior cases. The Court disagreed with the City’s argument that facial challenges to warrantless search provisions would always fail because such searches would never be unconstitutional in all circumstances. The Court reasoned that the test for a facial challenge is whether the “law is unconstitutional in all of its applications.” Therefore, the Court focuses its analysis on the group for whom the law is a restriction, not the group for whom the law is irrelevant. In other words, a facial challenge looks at those whose conduct the regulation affects, not those whose conduct is completely unaffected.
With the facial challenge question clarified, the Court then turned to the ordinance itself, finding it to be facially unconstitutional. Searches conducted without a warrant are per se unreasonable, unless they fit into one of the “specifically-established and well-delineated exceptions.” The Court conceptualized the warrantless search provision in the ordinance as an administrative search because it serves a “special need” other than conducting a criminal investigation: ensuring compliance with a recordkeeping requirement, established to deter criminals from operating on hotel premises. However, the ordinance was missing an important component of a valid administrative search: precompliance review before a neutral decision-maker, in the event that the hotel owner refuses to comply. Because the ordinance provided no such opportunity, it was facially invalid. Finally, the Court rejected the argument that hotels fell under the “closely-regulated industries” category, such that they possessed a severely diminished expectation of privacy and could be subjected to warrantless searches pursuant to a more “relaxed” standard.
Learn More in Court's Decision.