Cite as: 515 U. S. 646 (1995)
O'Connor, J., dissenting
the chance of finding liquor and thus subject all persons lawfully using the highways to the inconvenience and indignity of such a search." Id., at 153-154.
The Carroll Court's view that blanket searches are "intolerable and unreasonable" is well grounded in history. As recently confirmed in one of the most exhaustive analyses of the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment ever undertaken, see W. Cuddihy, The Fourth Amendment: Origins and Original Meaning (1990) (Ph.D. Dissertation at Claremont Graduate School) (hereinafter Cuddihy), what the Framers of the Fourth Amendment most strongly opposed, with limited exceptions wholly inapplicable here, were general searches—that is, searches by general warrant, by writ of assistance, by broad statute, or by any other similar authority. See id., at 1402, 1499, 1555; see also Clancy, The Role of Individualized Suspicion in Assessing the Reasonableness of Searches and Seizures, 25 Mem. St. U. L. Rev. 483, 528 (1994); Maclin, When the Cure for the Fourth Amendment Is Worse Than the Disease, 68 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1, 9-12 (1994); L. Levy, Original Intent and the Framers' Constitution 221-246 (1988). Although, ironically, such warrants, writs, and statutes typically required individualized suspicion, see, e. g., Cuddihy 1140 ("Typical of the American warrants of 1761-76 was Starke's 'tobacco' warrant, which commanded its bearer to 'enter any suspected Houses' ") (emphasis added), such requirements were subjective and largely unenforceable. Accordingly, these various forms of authority led in practice to "virtually unrestrained," and hence "general," searches. J. Landynski, Search and Seizure and the Supreme Court 20 (1966). To be sure, the Fourth Amendment, in the Warrant Clause, prohibits by name only searches by general warrants. But that was only because the abuses of the general warrant were particularly vivid in the minds of the Framers' generation, Cuddihy 1554-1560, and not because the Framers viewed other kinds of general searches as any less unreasonable. "Prohibition of the general warrant was part of a
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