McDonald v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
335 U.S. 451 · 1948
Citation profile
1,402 federal appellate · 155 district · 1,367 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 3,590 later decisions (182 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 2025 · most notably Terry v. Ohio (1968), Katz v. United States (1967)
1,402 federal appellate · 155 district · 1,367 state decisions — followed in 48 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
reviewedMcDonald v. United States (from District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Johnson v. United States · Weeks v. United States · Agnello v. United States · Harris v. United States
Cited together with Johnson v. United States · United States v. Jeffers · Katz v. United States · Carroll v. United States · Chimel v. California
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 3,590 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“We are not dealing with formalities. The presence of a search warrant serves a high function. Absent some grave emergency, the Fourth Amendment has interposed a magistrate between the citizen and the police. This was done not to shield criminals nor to make the home a safe haven for illegal activities. It was done so that an objective mind might weigh the need to invade that privacy in order to enforce the law. The right of privacy was deemed too precious to entrust to the discretion of those whose job is the detection of crime and the arrest of criminals. Power is a heady thing; and history shows that the police acting on their own cannot be trusted. And so the Constitution requires a magistrate to pass on the desires of the police before they violate the privacy of the home. We cannot be true to that constitutional requirement and excuse the absence of a search warrant without a showing by those who seek exemption from the constitutional mandate that the exigencies of the situation made that course imperative.”
118 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““Having forced an entry without either a search warrant or an arrest warrant to justify it, the felonious character of their entry, it seems to me, followed every step of their journey inside the house and tainted its fruits with illegality.””
15 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“When an officer undertakes to act as his own magistrate, he ought to be in a position to justify it by pointing to some real immediate and serious consequences if he postponed action to get a warrant.”
7 later decisions 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.