Messerschmidt v. Millender’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

76 federal appellate · 51 district · 9 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 242 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “government officials breathing room to make reasonable but mistaken judgments, and [to] protect[ ] all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.”

   11 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Harris v. Klare · Mara v. Rilling

2. “(1) when the issuing magistrate was misled by an affidavit containing false information or information that the affiant would have known was false if not for his reckless disregard of the truth; (2) when the issuing magistrate wholly abandon[s her] judicial role; (3) when the affidavit in support of the warrant is so lacking in indicia of probable cause as to render official belief in its existence entirely unreasonable; and (4) when a warrant is so facially deficient that the executing officer could not reasonably believe it was valid.”

   7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Avina v. United States · United States v. Triplett

3. “any defect here would not have been obvious from the face of the warrant. Rather, any arguable defect would have become apparent only upon a close parsing of the warrant application, and a comparison of the affidavit to the terms of the warrant to determine whether the affidavit established probable cause to search for all the items listed in the warrant. This is not an error that "just a simple glance" would have revealed. [ Groh , 540 U.S. at 564 , 124 S.Ct. 1284 ]. Indeed, unlike in Groh , the officers here did not merely submit their application to a magistrate. They also presented it for review by a superior officer, and a deputy district attorney, before submitting it to the magistrate. The fact that none of the officials who reviewed the application expressed concern about its validity demonstrates that any error was not obvious. Groh plainly does not control the result here.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Blake v. Lambert · United States v. Weber