concluding that the surprise "warrantless inspections required by the Mine Safety and Health Act do not offend the Fourth Amendment" because there is a strong governmental interest with regard to "improving the health and safety conditions in the Nation's underground and surface mines"
How later courts described this case
- concluding that the surprise "warrantless inspections required by the Mine Safety and Health Act do not offend the Fourth Amendment" because there is a strong governmental interest with regard to "improving the health and safety conditions in the Nation's underground and surface mines"
- explaining that in a pervasively regulated business "the federal regulatory presence is sufficiently comprehensive and defined that the owner of commercial property cannot help but be aware that his property will be subject to periodic inspections undertaken for specific purposes"
- holding that warrantless inspections by federal mine inspectors of underground mines at least four times a year and surface mines at least twice a year to ensure compliance with health and safety standards required by federal legislation did not violate Fourth Amendment
- upholding a warrantless search under the administrative search exception in part because, in addition to being “specifically tailored” to protect the government’s interests, the regulations the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977 imposed were “sufficiently pervasive and defined that the owner of such a [mine] cannot help but be aware that he will be subject to effective inspection”
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Justice Stevens,
concurring.
Like Justice Stewart, I believe the Court erred in Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U. S. 523 , when it overruled Frank v. *607 Maryland, 359 U. S. 360 . See post, at 609 (dissenting opinion). I also share Justice Stewart’s conviction that each of us has a duty to accept the law as it is; disagreement with the holding in a prior case is not a sufficient reason for refusing to honor it. 1 Unlike him, however, I also think the Court erred in Marshall v. Barlow’s, Inc., 436 U. S. 307 , when it concluded that Camara required it to invalidate the safety inspection program authorized by Congress in the Occupational Safety and Health Act. As I explained in my dissent in that case, neither the longevity of a regulatory program nor a businessman’s implied consent to regulations imposed by the Federal Government determines the reasonableness of a congressional judgment that the public interest in occupational health or safety justifies a program of warrantless inspections of commercial premises. See 436 U. S., at 336-339 (Stevens, J., dissenting).
Justice Stewart has cogently demonstrated that the rationale of today’s decision is much closer to the reasoning in my dissent than to the reasoning in the majority opinion in Barlow’s, Inc. Nevertheless, I am not persuaded that the holding in Barlow’s, Inc., requires the Court to invalidate the program of mine inspections authorized by the statute we construe today. 2 I accept the Court’s explanation of the differences between the scope of these statutes as sufficient to support a different result in this case. Because I agree with today’s majority that the cases are distinguishable, I need not confront the more difficult question whether Camara represented such a fundamental misreading of the Fourth Amendment that it should be overruled. I would merely observe that that option is more viable today than when some of the *608 reasoning that would support it could only be found in dissenting opinions, see 387 U. S., at 546-555 (Clark, J., dissenting); 436 U. S., at 325-339 (Stevens, J., dissenting), or in the earlier Court opinion in Frank that had itself been overruled in Camara .
See Florida Dept. of Health & Rehabilitative Services v. Florida Nursing Home Assn., 450 U. S. 147, 151 (Stevens, J., concurring).
I do not agree with Justice Stewart’s view that the doctrine of stare decisis requires that we respect dictum unnecessary to the decision in Barlow’s, Inc. Cf. McDaniel v. Sanchez, ante, p. 154 (Stewart, J., dissenting).