Carroll v. United States

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Carroll v. United States

Submitted March 14, 1924
Decided March 2, 1925

Full case name:	Carroll, et al. v. United States

Citations:	267 U.S. 132

Holding

Police searches of automobiles without a warrant do not violate the Fourth Amendment when the police have probable cause to believe contraband would be found in the automobile.

Court membership

Chief Justice: William Howard Taft
Associate Justices: Joseph McKenna, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Willis Van Devanter, James Clark McReynolds, Louis Brandeis, George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, Edward Terry Sanford

Case opinions

Majority by: Taft

Laws applied

Fourth Amendment, Volstead Act

Carroll v. U.S., 267 U.S. 132 (1925), became the case that police searches of automobiles without a warrant do not violate the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution when the police have probable cause to believe contraband would be found in the automobile. The rationale of the decision was that automobiles are mobile and thus law enforcement would be unreasonably hindered if forced to seek a search warrant for a place that would perhaps be elsewhere and hidden by the time the warrant was signed.

This decision, rendered in the early days of personal automobiling, marked the start of the legal gulf between reasonable expectations of privacy in one's home and automobile.

The opinion was delivered on March 2, 1925, by Chief Justice William Howard Taft.