In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, wrote that “the police could readily have obtained a warrant to search the shared residence.”

“Instead of adhering to the warrant requirement, today’s decision tells the police they may dodge it, nevermind ample time to secure the approval of a neutral magistrate,” Justice Ginsburg wrote. “Suppressing the warrant requirement, the court shrinks to petite size our holding in Georgia v. Randolph.”

The alignment of justices in the search case, Fernandez v. California, No. 12-7822, was fairly typical, as Justice Breyer has recently been joining his more conservative colleagues in cases concerning the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches.

The second decision, Kaley v. United States, No. 12-464, featured a more scrambled alignment and a spirited dissent from Chief Justice Roberts, who was joined by Justices Breyer and Sotomayor.

The case arose from the prosecution of Kerri and Brian Kaley, a New York couple, who were accused of participating in a scheme to obtain and sell prescription medical devices. They were unable to hire a lawyer to defend themselves because the government had frozen their assets.

A pair of 1989 Supreme Court decisions ruled that freezing assets before a criminal trial was permissible, even if it frustrated the defendant’s ability to hire a lawyer, so long as there was probable cause that a crime had been committed and the assets were linked to the offenses described in the indictment. The Kaleys did not challenge those decisions, but they did seek a hearing at which they could try to show that they were entitled to use the frozen money to defend themselves because the charges against them were flawed.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority, rejected that request.

“The only question is whether the Kaleys are constitutionally entitled to a judicial re-determination of the conclusion the grand jury already reached: that probable cause supports this criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “And that question, we think, has a ready answer, because a fundamental and historic commitment of our criminal justice system is to entrust those probable cause findings to grand juries.”