Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332 (2009), was a United States Supreme Court decision holding that the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution requires law-enforcement officers to demonstrate an actual and continuing threat to their safety posed by an arrestee, or a need to preserve evidence related to the crime of arrest from tampering by the arrestee, in order to justify a warrantless vehicular search incident to arrest conducted after the vehicle's recent occupants have been arrested and secured.

[1] The case involved Rodney J. Gant, who was arrested by Tucson, Arizona police on an outstanding warrant for driving with a suspended driver’s license.

[1] Gant's counsel argued that an unreasonable expansion of a limited authority to search vehicles incident to arrest provided by the Supreme Court's 1981 decision in New York v. Belton had been occurring.

Justice Scalia wrote a concurring opinion, stating that "we should simply abandon the Belton-Thornton charade of officer safety and overrule those cases.

Justice Breyer wrote a separate dissent agreeing with Justice Alito that New York v. Belton established a bright-line rule allowing a warrantless search of a vehicle's passenger compartment incident to the lawful arrest, but Breyer acknowledged that this rule can lead to outcomes that diverge from the underlying rationale of the Fourth Amendment.