Cite as: 531 U. S. 32 (2000)
Rehnquist, C. J., dissenting
Dakota v. Opperman, 428 U. S. 364, 368 (1976); see also New York v. Class, 475 U. S. 106, 113 (1986) ("[A]utomobiles are justifiably the subject of pervasive regulation by the State"); Cardwell v. Lewis, 417 U. S. 583, 590 (1974) ("One has a lesser expectation of privacy in a motor vehicle because its function is transportation and it seldom serves as one's residence or as the repository of personal effects"). The lowered expectation of privacy in one's automobile is coupled with the limited nature of the intrusion: a brief, standardized, nonintrusive seizure.6 The brief seizure of an automobile can hardly be compared to the intrusive search of the body or the home. Thus, just as the "special needs" inquiry serves to both define and limit the permissible scope of those searches, the Brown v. Texas balancing test serves to define and limit the permissible scope of automobile seizures.
Because of these extrinsic limitations upon roadblock seizures, the Court's newfound non-law-enforcement primary purpose test is both unnecessary to secure Fourth Amendment rights and bound to produce wide-ranging litigation over the "purpose" of any given seizure. Police designing highway roadblocks can never be sure of their validity, since a jury might later determine that a forbidden purpose exists. Roadblock stops identical to the one that we upheld in Sitz 10 years ago, or to the one that we upheld 24 years ago in Martinez-Fuerte, may now be challenged on the grounds that they have some concealed forbidden purpose.
Efforts to enforce the law on public highways used by millions of motorists are obviously necessary to our society. The Court's opinion today casts a shadow over what had been assumed, on the basis of stare decisis, to be a perfectly lawful activity. Conversely, if the Indianapolis police had assigned a different purpose to their activity here, but in no way changed what was done on the ground to individual
6 This fact distinguishes the roadblock seizure of an automobile from an inventory search of an automobile. Cf. Colorado v. Bertine, 479 U. S. 367 (1987) (automobile inventory search).
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