Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: Can stores search customers without permission?

Actually, stores probably have more latitude to conduct searches than the police have, since the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures applies only to action by the government, and not by private persons or private entities. Nevertheless, an unreasonable search by private parties such as store security can be and sometimes is the cause of a successful lawsuit for one or more torts such as battery, false imprisonment or perhaps defamation. The key to whether such a suit will succeed may, indeed, be whether the search was conducted without permission, but there is always a possibility that you may be held to have given "implied permission" by virtue of entering the store premises, or that the store had "probable cause" to detain and search.

The law is very pragmatic in this area, and there are no absolutes. You are neither exempt from detention and search, nor does the store have unfettered rights to accost and accuse. If they reasonably think you've shoplifted something, and even if they are wrong, the search may be privileged and non-tortious. On the other hand, if the store conducts the detention and search without suspicion and/or handle it in a heavy-handed and indelicate way, they can probably be sued successfully.

This is a much-litigated and much-discussed area of the law, but the lawyers who know the most about it would be under some kind of torts category on LawGuru, rather than business law.

So, the long and short of it is that whether you can hang the store out to dry or not in court depends more upon what's fair and just than upon any hard-and-fast search prohibition. Whether they can do it or not is a definite maybe.