Cite as: 506 U. S. 56 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
interior of the car and "no personal effects, which the Fourth Amendment traditionally has been deemed to protect" were searched or seized. 417 U. S., at 591 (opinion of Blackmun, J.). No meaningful privacy rights were invaded. But this left the argument, pressed by the dissent, that the evidence gathered was the product of a warrantless and hence illegal seizure of the car from the parking lot where the defendant had left it. However, the plurality was of the view that, because under the circumstances of the case there was probable cause to seize the car as an instrumentality of the crime, Fourth Amendment precedent permitted the seizure without a warrant. Id., at 593. Thus, both the plurality and dissenting Justices considered the defendant's auto deserving of Fourth Amendment protection even though privacy interests were not at stake. They differed only in the degree of protection that the Amendment demanded.
The Court of Appeals appeared to find more specific support for confining the protection of the Fourth Amendment to privacy interests in our decision in Hudson v. Palmer, 468 U. S. 517 (1984). There, a state prison inmate sued, claiming that prison guards had entered his cell without consent and had seized and destroyed some of his personal effects. We ruled that an inmate, because of his status, enjoyed neither a right to privacy in his cell nor protection against unreasonable seizures of his personal effects. Id., at 526-528, and n. 8; id., at 538 (O'Connor, J., concurring). Whatever else the case held, it is of limited usefulness outside the prison context with respect to the coverage of the Fourth Amendment.
We thus are unconvinced that any of the Court's prior cases supports the view that the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable seizures of property only where privacy or liberty is also implicated. What is more, our "plain view" decisions make untenable such a construction of the Amendment. Suppose, for example, that police officers lawfully enter a house, by either complying with the warrant requirement or satisfying one of its recognized exceptions—
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