Los Angeles v. Patel

A facial challenge attacks a statute itself rather than a particular application. Although facial relief can be difficult to obtain, the Court has allowed facial challenges under many constitutional provisions, including the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments. Its precedents also include decisions invalidating warrantless-search regimes on their face, such as drug-testing programs and laws authorizing warrantless home entry or luggage searches.

The City relied on Sibron v. New York, which said that the validity of a warrantless search is often best decided in a concrete factual setting. The Court read Sibron more narrowly. Sibron involved an ambiguous and newly enacted statute with broad categories whose constitutional applications could not readily be identified. It did not establish a categorical prohibition on facial Fourth Amendment challenges.

The City also argued that the ordinance could be constitutionally applied when police had a warrant, faced exigent circumstances, or obtained consent. But those circumstances independently authorize a search; the ordinance does no work in them. In judging whether a warrantless-search law is facially valid, the relevant applications are the searches the law itself authorizes, not searches independently justified by a warrant, exigency, or consent.

The Fourth Amendment generally treats searches outside the judicial process as unreasonable unless an established exception applies. Administrative searches may sometimes proceed without traditional probable cause because they serve special regulatory needs rather than ordinary criminal investigation. Assuming that the registry-inspection program served such an administrative purpose—ensuring compliance with recordkeeping requirements that may deter crime—the program still had to meet the minimum safeguards applicable to administrative searches.

Under Camara, See, and related cases, absent consent, exigency, or another exception, a person subjected to an administrative search must have an opportunity to obtain review of the demand before suffering penalties for refusal. Section 41.49(3)(a) gave the hotel operator no such choice: an operator who declined an officer’s demand could be arrested immediately. That arrangement created an unacceptable risk that officers would exceed statutory limits or use inspections to harass operators or guests.

The Court required only an opportunity for precompliance review, not a hearing before every inspection. The City could use an administrative subpoena issued by an officer without probable cause; an operator who objected could move to quash it before a neutral decisionmaker. Such objections would likely be uncommon, and police could preserve the records while review occurred when they reasonably feared alteration or destruction.

The decision was deliberately narrow. It did not question the City’s authority to require hotels to keep guest registries. It also left police free to inspect records with the operator’s consent, pursuant to a proper administrative warrant, or under another established exception to the warrant requirement, including exigent circumstances.

The closely regulated industry exception is narrow. The Court had recognized it for liquor sales, firearms dealing, mining, and automobile junkyards—industries with longstanding, intensive oversight and an inherent, clear, and significant risk to public welfare. Hotels, by contrast, are not intrinsically dangerous in that way. Treating them as closely regulated based on ordinary licensing, tax, rate-posting, and sanitation rules would risk making virtually every business subject to warrantless searches.

The City’s historical evidence did not establish a tradition of warrantless governmental inspections of hotel registers. Historical duties requiring innkeepers to serve travelers or evidence that some inns voluntarily kept registers open to public viewing did not show that officials possessed authority to inspect records on demand. Modern registries also contain sensitive identification and payment information with no clear historical analogue.

Even if hotels qualified as closely regulated, the ordinance would still fail the test of New York v. Burger. Although the City’s interest in accurate recordkeeping might be substantial, on-demand inspection without review was not necessary because officers could seek ex parte administrative warrants or preserve records while review was pending. The ordinance also failed to constrain officers’ discretion with sufficient certainty and regularity: it did not specify when or how often hotels could be searched.