Curtilage

Curtilage is a term used to refer to the area connected to, or immediately surrounding, a private dwelling. Just as the law regards an individual's home as “his castle,” courts recognize that individuals have heightened expectations of privacy in the area and the buildings immediately surrounding their residences. Thus, the courts often extend the protections individuals are afforded under the Fourth Amendment to curtilage.

The legal significance is related in part to the doctrine of open fields, which since the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hester v. United States (1924) are generally subject to warrantless searches to a degree that houses and their surrounding buildings are not. Similarly, in Oliver v. United States (1984), the Court held that police could conduct a warrantless search of a marijuana field a mile away from a house, although they could not conduct such a warrantless search of the house and the curtilage or of land and buildings immediately surrounding it. The Court's decision requiring warrants for wiretapping in Katz v. United States (1967) arguably called the concept of curtilage into some question by shifting the focus from whether physical trespass had occurred to whether the government had violated an expectation of privacy that the public was willing to accept as reasonable. Still, one can argue that individuals typically have a heightened expectation of privacy within their home and the area and structures that immediately surround it, particularly when the area is fenced.

The Court offered its most extensive discussion of curtilage in United States v. Dunn (1987). Writing the majority decision, Justice Byron White said that identifying whether an area involved curtilage involved four issues:

In Dunn, the Court decided that a barn located sixty yards away from a house and fifty yards away from the surrounding fence was not part of the house's curtilage and thus did not deserve heightened expectations of privacy.

In California v. Greenwood (1988), one reason that the Court gave for upholding a warrantless search of garbage that residents had left on a curb was that it was not within the curtilage of the house. Some critics argue that this decision demonstrates the weakness of a concept that was formulated at a time when many people lived in rural areas and that the idea needs to be expanded to cover structures and areas more likely to be encountered in urban or suburban settings.