Smith v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
1972
Citation profile
32 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 32 later decisions — most recently August 2010 · most notably State v. Middleton (1976), Brown v. United States (1988)
32 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 Terry v. Ohio · Adams v. Williams · Sibron v. State of New York Peters · Reserve Life Insurance v. Bankers Life & Casualty Co. · Balistrieri 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 32 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The Fourth Amendment does not require a policeman who lacks the precise level of information necessary for probable cause to arrest to simply shrug his shoulders and allow a crime to occur or a criminal to escape. On the contrary, Terry recognizes that it may be the essence of good police work to adopt an intermediate response. . . . A brief stop of a suspicious individual, in order to determine his identity or to maintain the status quo momentarily while obtaining more information, may be the most reasonable in light of the facts known to the officer at the time. [ Id., at 145-46 , 92 S.Ct. at 1923 .]”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[T]he officer did not know at the time he stopped appellant that a crime had in fact been committed, but he certainly had reasonable basis for believing that further investigation was indicated. [Id. at 67.]”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.