Westfall v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

5 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 5 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “There is no societal interest in protecting the privacy of those activities, such as the cultivation of crops, that occur in open fields. Moreover, as a practical matter these lands usually are accessible to the public and the police in ways that a home, an office, or commercial structure would not be. It is not generally true that fences or ‘No Trespassing’ signs effectively bar the public from viewing open fields in rural areas. And both [parties] concede that the public and police lawfully may survey lands from the air. For these reasons, the asserted expectation of privacy in open fields is not an expectation that ‘society recognizes as reasonable.’”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Davidson v. State