Johnson v. United States’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

146 federal appellate · 37 district · 107 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 403 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “A party is privileged from producing the evidence but not from its production.”

   13 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Burdeau v. McDowell · Dier v. Banton

2. “It is true that the transfer of books may have been against the defendant’s will, but it is compelled by the law as a necessary incident to the distribution of his property, not in order to obtain criminal evidence against him. Of course, a man cannot protect his property from being used to pay his debts by attaching to it a disclosure of crime. If the documentary confession comes to a third hand alio intuitu, as this did, the use of it in court does not compel the defendant to be a witness against himself.”

   8 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. United States v. Falcone · In Re Ross

3. “If the order to the bankrupt, standing alone, infringed his constitutional rights, it might be true that the provisions intended to save them would be inadequate and that nothing short of statutory immunity would suffice. But no constitutional rights are touched. The question is not of testimony but of surrender — not of compelling the bankrupt to be a witness against himself in a criminal case, present or future, but of compelling him to yield possession of property that he no longer is entitled to keep. If a trustee had been appointed, the title to the books would have vested in him by the express terms of § 70, and the bankrupt could not have withheld possession of what he no longer owned, on the ground that otherwise he might be punished. That is one of the misfortunes of bankruptcy if it follows a crime. The right not to be compelled to be a witness against oneself is not a right to appropriate property that may tell one’s story. As the bankruptcy court could have enforced title in favor of the trustee it could enforce possession ad interim in favor of the receiver. § 2. In the properly careful provision to protect him from use of the books in aid of prosecution the bankrupt got all that he could ask.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. In Re Fairbanks