elsewhere: grim amusements - illegal search and seizure

Grim Amusements / 23 January 2012 / illegal search and seizure -- apparently, the concept still exists in this country

...You know ... I'm by way of thinking that if you want to win your case, telling the Supreme Court that you have the authority (as opposed to the ability) to conduct what may be warrantless searches of the justices themselves is not a really good thing to do. [...] if the article is accurate, in a truly confusing maneuver, while the justices all agreed that the prolonged duration of this "search" without a warrant was unreasonable and thus resulted in the overturning of the sentence, they declined to state whether a warrant was required in the first place.

Seriously, an actual lawyer is going to have to go over that to make sense of it to me, because it sounds like the only thing the Court could clearly agree on was that the government had exceeded its authority in this particular case. They then bent themselves into pretzels to avoid telling the government exactly what its authority was....