48
Stevens, J., dissenting
a potentially lengthy search.5 I also assume that motorists—even those who are not carrying contraband—have an interest in preserving the privacy of their vehicles and possessions from the prying eyes of a curious stranger. The fact that this particular officer successfully used a similar method of obtaining consent to search roughly 786 times in one year, State v. Retherford, 93 Ohio App. 3d 586, 591- 592, 639 N. E. 2d 498, 502, dism'd, 69 Ohio St. 3d 1488, 635 N. E. 2d 43 (1994), indicates that motorists generally respond in a manner that is contrary to their self-interest. Repeated decisions by ordinary citizens to surrender that interest cannot satisfactorily be explained on any hypothesis other than an assumption that they believed they had a legal duty to do so.
The Ohio Supreme Court was therefore entirely correct to presume in the first syllabus preceding its opinion that a "continued detention" was at issue here. 73 Ohio St. 3d, at 650, 653 N. E. 2d, at 696.6 The Ohio Court of Appeals reached a similar conclusion. In response to the State's con-5 Though this search does not appear to have been particularly intrusive, that may not always be so. See Brief for American Civil Liberties Union et al. as Amici Curiae 28-29. Indeed, our holding in Florida v. Jimeno, 500 U. S. 248 (1991), allowing police to open closed containers in the context of an automobile consent search where the "consent would reasonably be understood to extend to a particular container," id., at 252, ensures that many motorists will wind up "consenting" to a far broader search than they might have imagined. See id., at 254-255 ("only objection that the police could have to" a rule requiring police to seek consent to search containers as well as the automobile itself "is that it would prevent them from exploiting the ignorance of a citizen who simply did not anticipate that his consent to search the car would be understood to authorize the police to rummage through his packages") (Marshall, J., dissenting).
6 It is ordinarily the syllabus that precedes an Ohio Supreme Court opinion, rather than the opinion itself, that states the law of the case. Cassidy v. Glossip, 12 Ohio St. 2d 17, 24, 231 N. E. 2d 64, 68 (1967); see Migra v. Warren City School Dist. Bd. of Ed., 465 U. S. 75, 86, n. 8 (1984); Ohio v. Gallagher, 425 U. S. 257, 259 (1976).
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