Ruth Bader Ginsburg was never going to be my favorite thing about the Supreme Court. Revered by progressives who turned her into a pop culture icon—”the Notorious RBG,” they called her—Ginsburg was probably the most left-leaning member of the institution on which she served. She believed in a “living constitution” that changed according to the circumstances of the times, rather than one whose text was settled. She was a friend of legal abortion and a foe of religious liberty.

Yet that doesn’t mean she was always wrong. Witty, urbane, known for her close friendship with the late conservative stalwart Antonin Scalia, Ginsburg seemed periodically to flirt with the very textualism she’d supposedly renounced, especially when it came to civil liberties. She was on the right side of the 2000s detainment cases, ruling against the Bush administration and defending habeas corpus in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush, among others. And in another, often-overlooked decision, Kentucky v. King, she alone upheld the necessity of obtaining a warrant under the Fourth Amendment.

Police in Lexington, Kentucky, tracked a suspect in a drug deal to an apartment complex, where they entered a breezeway and heard a door slam. At the end of the corridor were two doors, with officers unsure which one the suspect had entered. They smelled marijuana from behind the door to the left, knocked, and announced themselves. From within, they heard something being moved, suspected that evidence was being destroyed, and so busted down the door. Inside, they discovered a guest smoking marijuana along with various drugs and drug paraphernalia. Their initial suspect was later found behind the door to the right and apprehended.

Were police justified in forcibly entering the first apartment? Or did they need to obtain a warrant (which they could have gotten easily and expeditiously)? At issue was what’s called “exigent circumstances,” which allow police to disregard the warrant requirement in the event of an emergency. Generally, per a previous ruling by the Court, those exceptions must be “few in number and carefully delineated,” lest the Fourth Amendment be drained of its meaning. Exigent circumstances, though subject to tangling in lower courts, were understood to cover when life and limb was at risk, when a suspect was fleeing, and when evidence would otherwise be destroyed.

The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled against the police, finding that the entry into the first apartment had been improper. They held that law enforcement cannot create those exigent circumstances if they are reasonably foreseeable in advance, i.e. they can’t cause objects to be moved because they knocked on the wrong door. In an 8-1 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed. Sam Alito wrote the opinion:

As previously noted, warrantless searches are allowed when the circumstances make it reasonable, within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, to dispense with the warrant requirement. Therefore, the answer to the question before us is that the exigent circumstances rule justifies a warrantless search when the conduct of the police preceding the exigency is reasonable in the same sense. Where, as here, the police did not create the exigency by engaging or threatening to engage in conduct that violates the Fourth Amendment, warrantless entry to prevent the destruction of evidence is reasonable and thus allowed.

At first blush, that seems sensible enough—all the police did was knock on a door, hardly an unconstitutional course of action. Yet as Ginsburg observed in her short and pointed dissent, by taking such a broad view of exigent circumstances, the Court had unwittingly defanged the Fourth Amendment (emphasis added):

In no quarter does the Fourth Amendment apply with greater force than in our homes, our most private space which, for centuries, has been regarded as ‘”entitled to special protection.”‘ …Home intrusions, the Court has said, are indeed “the chief evil against which … the Fourth Amendment is directed.” …How “secure” do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and, on hearing sounds indicative of things moving, forcibly enter and search for evidence of unlawful activity?

That’s the winning point right there. Taken to its extreme, the Court’s logic in Kentucky could see police show up at an apartment complex where drug activity was suspected, knock on every door, and kick them down the second they heard anything they could construe as potential evidence being altered. If that’s allowed, then the Fourth Amendment has no force, no grip. As Ginsburg wrote, “There is every reason to conclude that securing a warrant was entirely feasible in this case, and no reason to contract the Fourth Amendment’s dominion.”

She was a formidable legal mind, and when she was right, she was right. May she rest in peace.