Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's plurality opinion established an "operating realities" test for future courts to consider when public employees challenged searches during investigations, reflecting the lower reasonable suspicion standard the government had to meet as an employer.

That did not establish binding precedent, since Antonin Scalia argued in a separate concurring opinion that her standard was too vague, and that the same searches which would be reasonable for a private employer were proper when conducted by their public counterparts.

Despite the two different standards resulting from the split five-justice majority, lower courts have generally followed O'Connor's "operational realities" test in future cases involving actual searches.

Observers thought the justices might resolve the conflict the next time a similar case of public employees alleging a search violated their Fourth Amendment rights came before it.

A month later, he asked Dr. Dennis O'Connor, the hospital's executive director and his superior, to sign some thank-you letters to the residents who had made contributions, and to authorize some purchase orders for peripherals and other accessories for the computer.

[1] Ortega retained an attorney and filed a Section 1983 suit against O'Connor (who had now become director of the California Department of Mental Health[2]) Owen, Friday, other parties and the state shortly afterwards in federal court, seeking $750,000 in compensatory and punitive damages.

In addition to the violation of his Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, he made tort claims for invasion of privacy and breach of covenant of good faith and fair dealings under California law.

The defendants argued that they had entered Ortega's office and gone through the contents of his desk purely to inventory property and separate state-owned items from the doctor's personal possessions, which it claimed was standard practice when employees had resigned or been terminated.

She applied the two-pronged test from the Supreme Court's 1967 Katz v. United States decision[4] to establish whether Dr. Ortega had a reasonable expectation of privacy over the contents of his desk and office.

In one,[6] the presence of sensitive and confidential documents within a desk[note 2] was held to strengthen the privacy expectation; and in the other,[7] the personal lock that a police officer had used for his department locker led to the suppression of a sawed-off shotgun seized by federal agents.

All nine justices agreed that public employees had Fourth Amendment protections during administrative searches in the workplace, and that routine work-related intrusions as discussed at oral argument did not constitute a violation.

In a separate concurring opinion, Justice Scalia rejected that as too vague to be useful to lower courts, and proposed instead that any search that would be reasonable for a private employer would be permissible for a public one.

He believed the majority had put too much weight on the different interpretations of the intrusion by the district and appellate courts, since he felt it was clearly an investigatory search for evidence against Dr. Ortega.

He did not feel, as they did, that outside of special cases such as the school system that it would have been detrimental to the operations of a public agency such as the hospital to have some sort of independent review and establish probable cause for an administrative search related to possible violations of policy.

"[22] Lastly O'Connor found the district court's finding on summary judgment that the intrusion was for the purposes of securing state property to be in error since there was a genuine dispute of fact.

"[29] Blackmun began his disagreement with the plurality's embrace of the reasonable suspicion standard by agreeing with it that government employees retained their Fourth Amendment rights at work.

Thus, the plurality's remark that the "employee may avoid exposing personal belongings at work by simply leaving them at home," reveals on [their part] a certain insensitivity to the "operational realities of the workplace"[31]Thus he thought it especially important that the context of the search be considered.

An independent review by a magistrate might, he added, have helped make the search not only constitutional but more efficient, since they would have been forced to list and justify every aspect of the office and desk they wished to look through.

[37] Circuit judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain wrote for a unanimous panel that the sanctions, while within limits of judicial discretion, had so adversely affected Ortega's case that the verdict was tainted.

And, further, they were unjustified as the trial record included a letter from Ortega to Paul Hammerness, the assistant attorney general handling the case, referring to "the enclosed witness list", that had been stamped as received by the court in November 1992.

[37] On remand, O'Connor and Friday, the only defendants left, changed their strategy and asserted qualified immunity,[note 6] for the first time, dropping their claim that the need to secure or inventory state property justified their intrusion.

During pretrial motions, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who took over the case since Vukasin had died, barred the use of qualified immunity and ruled that sexual harassment could not have justified the search.

"[I]t was clearly established in 1981 that, in the absence of an accepted practice or regulation to the contrary, government employees such as Dr. Ortega had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their private offices, desks, and file cabinets, thereby triggering the protections of the Fourth Amendment with regard to searches and seizures", Reinhardt wrote.

[1]O'Connor and Friday had argued that, by denying them the opportunity to raise the sexual harassment claims as a justification for the search, Patel had improperly granted what amounted to sua sponte partial summary judgement against them.

A 5-4 majority held that the urine testing the Customs Service proposed for internal promotion to positions involving drug interdiction, carrying firearms or handling classified material was reasonable since it was "not designed to serve the ordinary needs of law enforcement.

"[43] Later, when turning down a 1997 challenge by employees of Puerto Rico Telephone to a proposed video surveillance plan, Judge Bruce M. Selya of the First Circuit called O'Connor "[t]he watershed case in this enclave of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence".

[44] His opinion surveyed a number of other district and circuit cases considering the "operating realities" of public workplaces to establish whether a legitimate expectation of privacy existed.

[46] In a New York case that echoed Scalia's questions to Klein at oral argument, the Second Circuit found it reasonable for a judge to have court officers seize the contents of his just-fired law clerk's desk since the relationship between the two required free and complete access to each other's papers.

[46][49] As Ortega's dispute with his lawyer was coming to an end, elsewhere in California the events were unfolding that would lead to the next case where the Court would consider the Fourth Amendment rights of public employees during administrative investigations.

Afterwards, they sued the superior officers, the department, the city and the pager provider for violation of the Stored Communications Act and their Fourth Amendment rights.