Thims v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1977
Citation profile
47 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 51 later decisions — most recently March 2019 · most notably Frye v. Commonwealth (1986), Morrison v. Bestler (1990)
47 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
Relies on Wong Sun v. United States · Katz v. United States · Mapp v. Ohio · Chimel v. California · Coolidge v. New Hampshire
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 51 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[The officer] had probable cause to believe that the car was the fruit of a crime [and] that it might be stolen.... He then for the first time had probable cause to seize and search the vehicle. To do so he had the right to enter the driveway and open the car door to determine the identification number. Such an investigation, when made on public property or property open to the public, has been held not to be a search, or if a search, to be a reasonable one, even in the absence of probable cause. Here, while the investigation was made on private property, it was grounded on probable cause.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“himself might have telephoned to a friend, relative, or confederate to remove the car, or he might have been released on bail, and, during [the officer's] absence to obtain a warrant, removed the car himself.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“had been purchased with stolen and forged checks and was the fruit of a crime, that it may have been stolen, and that it contained stolen property,”
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.