District of Columbia v. Little’s Empirical Analysis
178 F.2d 13 · 1949
Citation profile
43 federal appellate · 3 district · 15 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 76 later decisions (8 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 2025 · most notably Camara v. Municipal Court of City and County of San Francisco (1967), See v. City of Seattle (1967)
43 federal appellate · 3 district · 15 state decisions — followed in 11 states
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.
Appellate journey
Relationships
Relies on Carroll v. United States · Johnson v. United States · Boyd v. United States · Chaplinsky v. State of New Hampshire · McDonald v. United States
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 76 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“'an immediate major crisis in the performance of duty afford[ing] neither time nor opportunity to apply to a magistrate.'”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“"[T]he common-law right of a man to privacy in his home * * * is one of the indispensable ultimate essentials of our concept of civilization. It was firmly established in the common law as one of the bright features of the Anglo-Saxon contributions to human progress. It was not related to crime or to suspicion of crime. It belonged to all men, not merely to criminals, real or suspected. * * * To say that a man suspected of crime has a right to protection against [the] search of his home without a warrant, but that a man not suspected of crime has no such protection, is a fantastic absurdity."”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Democratic government has distinguishing features. One of them is freedom of speech for the individual; another is freedom of religion. Another is the right of privacy of a home from intrusion by government officials. These characteristics are not mere hallmarks. They are the beams and pillars about which the structure was built and upon which it depends. If private homes are opened to the intrusion of government enforcement officials, at the wish of those officials, without the intervening mind and hand of a magistrate, one prop of the structure of our system is gone ... another form of government will have been substituted. ... ... The Fourth Amendment did not confer a right upon the people. It was a precautionary statement of a lack of federal governmental power, coupled with a rigidly restricted permission to invade the existing right. The right guaranteed was a right already belonging to the people. The reason for the search warrant clause was that public interest required that personal privacy be invadable for the detection of crime, and the Amendment provided the sole and only permissible process by which the right of privacy could be invaded. To view the Amendment as a limitation upon an otherwise unlimited right of search is to invert completely the true posture of rights and the limitations thereon.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.