Opinion of the Court violated is, of course, a different question that requires determining if the seizure was reasonable. That inquiry entails the weighing of various factors and is not before us. The Court of Appeals recognized that there had been a seizure, but concluded that it was a seizure only in a "technical" sense, not within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. This conclusion followed from a narrow reading of the Amendment, which the court construed to safeguard only privacy and liberty interests while leaving unprotected possessory interests where neither privacy nor liberty was at stake. Otherwise, the court said, "a constitutional provision enacted two centuries ago [would] make every repossession and eviction with police assistance actionable under-of all things-the Fourth Amendment[, which] would both trivialize the amendment and gratuitously shift a large body of routine commercial litigation from the state courts to the federal courts. That trivializing, this shift, can be prevented by recognizing the difference between possessory and privacy interests." 942 F. 2d, at 1077. Because the officers had not entered Soldal's house, rummaged through his possessions, or, in the Court of Appeals' view, interfered with his liberty in the course of the eviction, the Fourth Amendment offered no protection against the "grave deprivation" of property that had occurred. Ibid. We do not agree with this interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. The Amendment protects the people from unreasonable searches and seizures of "their persons, houses, papers, and effects." This language surely cuts against the novel holding below, and our cases unmistakably hold that the Amendment protects property as well as privacy. This 7 In holding that the Fourth Amendment's reach extends to property as such, we are mindful that the Amendment does not protect possessory interests in all kinds of property. See, e. g., Oliver v. United States, 466 U.S. 170, 176-177 (1984). This case, however, concerns a house, which the Amendment's language explicitly includes, as it does a person's effects. Opinion of the Court much was made clear in Jacobsen, supra, where we explained that the first Clause of the Fourth Amendment "protects two types of expectations, one involving 'searches,' the other 'seizures.' A 'search' occurs when an expectation of privacy that society is prepared to consider reasonable is infringed. A 'seizure' of property occurs where there is some meaningful interference with an individual's possessory interests in that property." 466 U. S., at 113 (footnote omitted). See also id., at 120; Horton v. California, 496 U. S. 128, 133 (1990); Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U. S. 321, 328 (1987); Maryland v. Macon, 472 U. S. 463, 469 (1985); Texas v. Brown, 460 U. S. 730, 747–748 (1983) (STEVENS, J., concurring in judgment); United States v. Salvucci, 448 U. S. 83, 91, n. 6 (1980). Thus, having concluded that chemical testing of powder found in a package did not compromise its owner's privacy, the Court in Jacobsen did not put an end to its inquiry, as would be required under the view adopted by the Court of Appeals and advocated by respondents. Instead, adhering to the teachings of United States v. Place, 462 U. S. 696 (1983), it went on to determine whether the invasion of the owners' "possessory interests" occasioned by the destruction of the powder was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Jacobsen, supra, at 124-125. In Place, although we found that subjecting luggage to a “dog sniff" did not constitute a search for Fourth Amendment purposes because it did not compromise any privacy interest, taking custody of Place's suitcase was deemed an unlawful seizure for it unreasonably infringed "the suspect's possessory interest in his luggage." 462 U. S., at 708.8 Although lacking a privacy component, the property rights in both instances nonetheless were not 8 Place also found that to detain luggage for 90 minutes was an unreasonable deprivation of the individual's "liberty interest in proceeding with his itinerary," which also is protected by the Fourth Amendment. 462 U. S., at 708-710. Opinion of the Court disregarded, but rather were afforded Fourth Amendment protection. Respondents rely principally on precedents such as Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347 (1967), Warden, Maryland Penitentiary v. Hayden, 387 U. S. 294 (1967), and Cardwell v. Lewis, 417 U. S. 583 (1974), to demonstrate that the Fourth Amendment is only marginally concerned with property rights. But the message of those cases is that property rights are not the sole measure of Fourth Amendment violations. The Warden opinion thus observed, citing Jones v. United States, 362 U. S. 257 (1960), and Silverman v. United States, 365 U. S. 505 (1961), that the "principal" object of the Amendment is the protection of privacy rather than property and that "this shift in emphasis from property to privacy has come about through a subtle interplay of substantive and procedural reform." 387 U. S., at 304. There was no suggestion that this shift in emphasis had snuffed out the previously recognized protection for property under the Fourth Amendment. Katz, in declaring violative of the Fourth Amendment the unwarranted overhearing of a telephone booth conversation, effectively ended any lingering notions that the protection of privacy depended on trespass into a protected area. In the course of its decision, the Katz Court stated that the Fourth Amendment can neither be translated into a provision dealing with constitutionally protected areas nor into a general constitutional right to privacy. The Amendment, the Court said, protects individual privacy against certain kinds of governmental intrusion, "but its protections go further, and often have nothing to do with privacy at all." 389 U. S., at 350. As for Cardwell, a plurality of this Court held in that case that the Fourth Amendment did not bar the use in evidence of paint scrapings taken from and tire treads observed on the defendant's automobile, which had been seized in a parking lot and towed to a police lockup. Gathering this evidence was not deemed to be a search, for nothing from the 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 Opinion of the Court e. g., through a valid consent or a showing of exigent circumstances. If they come across some item in plain view and seize it, no invasion of personal privacy has occurred. Horton, 496 U. S., at 133-134; Brown, supra, at 739 (opinion of REHNQUIST, J.). If the boundaries of the Fourth Amendment were defined exclusively by rights of privacy, "plain view" seizures would not implicate that constitutional provision at all. Yet, far from being automatically upheld, "plain view" seizures have been scrupulously subjected to Fourth Amendment inquiry. Thus, in the absence of consent or a warrant permitting the seizure of the items in question, such seizures can be justified only if they meet the probable-cause standard, Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U. S. 321, 326-327 (1987),9 and if they are unaccompanied by unlawful trespass, Horton, 496 U. S., at 136-137.10 That is because, the absence of a privacy interest notwithstanding, "[a] seizure of the article would obviously invade the owner's possessory interest." Id., at 134; see also Brown, 460 U. S., at 739 (opinion of REHNQUIST, J.). The plain-view doctrine "merely reflects an application of the Fourth Amendment's central requirement of reasonableness to the law governing seizures of property." Ibid.; Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U. S. 443, 468 (1971); id., at 516 (WHITE, J., concurring and dissenting). The Court of Appeals understandably found it necessary to reconcile its holding with our recognition in the plain-view cases that the Fourth Amendment protects property as such. In so doing, the court did not distinguish this case on the ground that the seizure of the Soldals' home took place in a "When "operational necessities" exist, seizures can be justified on less than probable cause. 480 U. S., at 327. That in no way affects our analysis, for even then it is clear that the Fourth Amendment applies. Ibid., see also United States v. Place, 462 U. S. 696, 703 (1983). 10 Of course, if the police officers' presence in the home itself entailed a violation of the Fourth Amendment, no amount of probable cause to believe that an item in plain view constitutes incriminating evidence will justify its seizure. Horton, 496 U. S., at 136-137. |