Wednesday the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 that police officers may not search a home if any person residing there objects. In the incident that created the case, police had been called to the home on a domestic violence dispute. During the course of the investigation, the wife told police that her husband had cocaine in the home and she would show them where it was. The husband, understandably, told the police they did not have permission to enter the home the couple shared to search for the cocaine.

I'm a little bit disappointed in this decision because it leads to a bizarre result. The wife doesn't have the authority to allow a search of the home over her husband's objection (or vice versa), but the wife could simply walk inside, grab the drugs and present them to the police. After all, she's the co-owner, it's not like she can trespass in her own home.

But what this case clearly demonstrates is that Justice Antonin Scalia is a lot brighter [PDF format file] than his liberal counterpart, Justice John Paul Stevens.

In any event, JUSTICE STEVENS’ panegyric to the equal rights of women under modern property law does not support his conclusion that “[a]ssuming . . . both spouses are competent, neither one is a master possessing the power to override the other’s constitutional right to deny entry to their castle.” Ante, at 2–3. The issue at hand is what to do when there is a conflict between two equals. Now that women have authority to consent, as JUSTICE STEVENS claims men alone once did, it does not follow that the spouse who refuses consent should be the winner of the contest. JUSTICE STEVENS could just as well have followed the same historical developments to the opposite conclusion: Now that “the male and the female are equal partners,” ante, at 2, and women can consent to a search of their property, men can no longer obstruct their wishes. Men and women are no more “equal” in the majority’'s regime, where both sexes can veto each other’s consent, than on the dissent’s view, where both sexes cannot.

Finally, I must express grave doubt that today’s decision deserves JUSTICE STEVENS’ celebration as part of the forward march of women’s equality. Given the usual patterns of domestic violence, how often can police be expected to encounter the situation in which a man urges them to enter the home while a woman simultaneously demands that they stay out? The most common practical effect of today’s decision, insofar as the contest between the sexes is concerned, is to give men the power to stop women from allowing police into their homes— which is, curiously enough, precisely the power that JUSTICE STEVENS disapprovingly presumes men had in 1791.

That's got to hurt!