Gate and I Discuss Administrative Law

Gate took a break from reading the paper to look over some of my tax records as I was making photocopies of them for our upcoming appointment with the Social Security Administration.

I said, "Should you be doing that without a warrant?"

Gate responded "Its an administrative search, look it up."

I looked it up and then asked Gate, "Well, the controlling opinion is a 1988 finding by the Supreme Court of Illinois in the Case of People vs Madison, and in that they quote an earlier finding that, 

"...One of the fundamental principles of administrative searches is that the government may not use an administrative inspection scheme as a pretext to search for evidence of criminal violations...""

Gate responded, "what do you mean pretext, I'm just looking for some... uh...stuff..."

George adds that Gate may have cited a case that is less than national,

"Fourth Amendment reasonableness is predominantly an objective inquiry.  We ask whether the circumstances, viewed objectively, justify [the challenged] action. If so, that action was reasonable whatever the subjective intent motivating the relevant officials. This approach recognizes that the Fourth Amendment regulates conduct rather than thoughts, and it promotes evenhanded, uniform enforcement of the law. 

Two limited exceptions to this rule are our special-needs and administrative-search cases, where actual motivations do matter." (emphasis added and internal citations and quotation marks omitted).

Ashcroft v. Al-Kidd, 563 U.S. 731, 735-36 (2011)