United States v. McLaughlin’s Empirical Analysis
170 F.3d 889 · 1999
Citation profile
20 federal appellate · 3 district · 9 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 53 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 2020 · most notably Arizona v. Gant (2009), Thornton v. United States (2004)
20 federal appellate · 3 district · 9 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Applies 18 U.S.C. § 3731 · 21 U.S.C. § 841 (§ 401 of the Controlled Substances Act)
Relies on Chimel v. California · New York v. Belton · McDonald v. United States · Maryland v. Garrison · Knowles v. Iowa
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 53 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[I]n our search for clarity, we have now abandoned our constitutional moorings and floated to a place where the law approves of purely exploratory searches of vehicles during which officers with no definite objective or reason for the search are allowed to rummage around in a car to see what they might find.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“[t]he relevant distinction turns not upon the moment of the arrest versus the moment of the search but upon whether the arrest and search are so separated in time or by intervening events that the latter cannot be said to have been incident to the former.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“In our application of Belton's `bright-line' [rule] ... the rationales behind the search incident to arrest exception have been abandoned, the purpose has been lost, and, as Chief Justice Rehnquist predicted, little certainty remains.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.