This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 26, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When you apply the Fourth Amendment to the security of your home,

you tend to think of the police and not bureaucrats.

Maurice Thompson is executive director of the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law in Ohio.

He argues that when a home goes up for sale, that's not a good enough reason for a pointless

useless government search of that home. He's challenging a government inspection

regime in Ohio. People often think of criminal searches when they think of the Fourth Amendment

and searches that might be prohibited in general and they might think of criminals

running into their house with drugs and police changing them, chasing them rather,

and whether a warrant is needed for that.

However, a lot of the government searches that tend to implicate Fourth Amendment concerns, particularly

in the wake of a mountain of new really helpful president from the Supreme Court, is in the field of regulatory and

administrative searches things like rental inspections of people's homes or

what are called point of sale or pre-sale inspections of people's homes and Fourth Amendment

scrutiny has really increased from the Supreme Court in a series of cases

beginning with United States v Jones in 2013 and then the victory for

hotel operators in Los Angeles in Patel the city of Los Angeles in 2015 to the

point where it's very clear that if the government is going to do a

search which is an inquiry for information then it has to have either a warrant

or a subpoena if they're documents and that's especially true if the government's going to do a search of the

The home or even a house that's not a home but is a rental property or a vacant house

...