Are Hotels dangerous? The Supreme Court weighs in

There was a time when hotels were considered dens of hustlers, gamblers and all manner of scuzzy individuals, to the point that workers noted down the full details of an incoming guest, half expecting to turn them over to the police upon request (or be threatened with 6 months in jail and a $1,000 fine).

In June, the Supreme Court declared that law unconstitutional, leading the New York Times to print an op-ed this week asking the question, “ARE hotels a hotbed of poverty, oppression and danger? Or are they relatively benign institutions of temporary respite?”

For proponents of privacy, the decision, written by Justice Sotomayor, was welcome. “Hotels,” she says, “— like practically all commercial premises or services — can be put to use for nefarious ends,” but, “are not intrinsically dangerous.”

Justice Scalia disagrees, calling hotels, “an obvious haven for those who trade in human misery” and “a particularly attractive site for criminal activity ranging from drug dealing and prostitution to human trafficking,” offering “privacy and anonymity on the cheap.”

Whatever you may think of Scalia, he may have a good point.

The divergent views, the article points out, “highlight the way hotels have long occupied a gray area in American life,” citing the author of “Hotel: An American History,” A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, who wrote about how “hotelkeepers have long struggled to control and purify the experience of an overnight stay, a struggle that pitted them against a veritable horde of ‘adulterers, seducers and prostitutes.’”

Indeed, that’s what inspired the Gideons to begin putting bibles (now totaling two billion) in hotel rooms across the United States. Read the full Times article here.