Smith v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
2 district · 25 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 29 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently November 2013 · most notably Smith v. Maryland (1979), Charnes v. DiGiacomo (1980)
2 district · 25 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 Katz v. United States · Olmstead v. United States · United States v. White · Desist v. United States · United States v. Miller
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 29 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““We hold that there is no constitutionally protected reasonable expectation of privacy in the numbers dialed into a telephone system and hence no search within the fourth amendment is implicated by the use of a pen register installed at the central offices of the telephone company. While the guarantees of the fourth amendment are broad, they are not boundless ...; not everything a person may want to be private is protected by the fourth amendment. As Katz [v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 88 S.Ct. 507 , 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967)] teaches, the fourth amendment does not afford our citizens ‘a general constitutional right to privacy.’ ” (Citation omitted).”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““While the content of a call is not revealed to the telephone company, the information as to the number dialed must necessarily be revealed, since it is through telephone company switching equipment that calls are completed. As a recipient of such information, the company may reveal it since the caller can have no reasonable expectation that it will remain private. In fact, the caller should have even less of a justified expectation of privacy, since unlike the disclosures in [United States v.] White [ 401 U.S. 745 , 91 S.Ct. 1122 , 28 L.Ed.2d 453 (1971) ] and [United States v.] Miller [ 425 U.S. 435 , 96 S.Ct. 1619 , 48 L.Ed.2d 71 (1976)] the use of a pen register does not reveal the contents of a communication.””
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.