Brigham City Emergency Aid Lives On

In 2006, a unanimous Supreme Court adopted an ‘emergency aid’ rule for saving life and limb: “[P]olice may enter a home without a warrant when they have an objectively reasonable basis for believing that an occupant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with such injury.” Brigham City v. Stuart, 547 U.S. 398 (2006). Despite the unanimity, Justice Stevens penned a concurrence about it being “an odd flyspeck of a case,” a strange claim given that the unanimous Court therein announced a constitutional rule. But he had voted against granting cert, and… apparently he felt the need to defend himself. (For the record, silence would have been golden.)

I have always thought it wise to have a sui generis standard for emergency aid—preventing harm is ever better than punishing it ex post—and thus I teach Brigham City as its own category. Not probable cause. Not reasonable suspicion. Emergency aid ‘reason to believe.’ Thankfully, with the Court’s unanimous opinion in Case v. Montana (No. 24-624, 1/14/2026), that remains, and even more explicitly so.

Here’s some of the Court’s language:

Brigham City’s reasonableness standard means just what it says, with no further gloss. … Brigham City did not adopt Terry’s reasonable-suspicion standard …, [nor the probable cause standard]. Ra­ther, Brigham City formulated its own standard for dealing with household emergencies—again, whether an officer has “an objectively reasonable basis for believing” that an occu­pant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with such harm. … Case, however, wants something more. He recognizes that the Brigham City test applies here, and that it has had but one formulation: In describing and applying that stand­ard, we have never used any different terms. But still, Case urges us now to understand the Brigham City test as “sounding in probable cause.” What the test really requires, Case con­tends, is that police officers “have probable cause to believe an occupant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with such injury.” … We decline Case’s invitation to put a new probable-cause spin onto Brigham City. “The probable-cause standard,” this Court has often stated, “is peculiarly related to crimi­nal investigations.” … We repeat today what we have held before: An officer may enter a home without a warrant if he has “an objectively reasonable basis for believing that an occupant is seriously injured or imminently threatened with such injury.”

Very good.

Despite the unanimity, Justice Sotomayor concurred to explain that “the presence of law enforcement at times can escalate the situation rather than ameliorate it.” True, but unnecessary to write up here, I think.

Justice Gorsuch concurred to root emergency aid in the common law, proudly citing to his near-disastrous “dissent” in Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018), which made that seminal privacy win only 5-4. Silence would have been golden.