Theofel’s Empirical Analysis
Citation profile
16 district · 9 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 89 later decisions — most recently December 2021 · most notably Sosa, 139 Cal. App. 4th 1423 - O'GRADY v. Superior Court (2006)
16 district · 9 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 Bumper v. North Carolina · California Motor Transport Co. v. Trucking Unlimited · Lewis v. United States · Professional Real Estate Investors, Inc. v. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. · United States v. Gonzales
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 89 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(17) “electronic storage” means— (A) any temporary, intermediate storage of a wire or electronic communication incidental to the electronic transmission thereof; and (B) any storage of such communication by an electronic communication service for purposes of backup protection of such communication;”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Like the tort of trespass, the Stored Communications Act protects individuals’ privacy and proprietary interests. The Act reflects Congress’s judgment that users have a legitimate interest in the confidentiality of communications in electronic storage at a communications facility. Just as trespass protects those who rent space from a commercial storage facility to hold sensitive documents, cf. Prosser and Keeton on the Law of Torts § 13, at 78 (W. Page Keeton ed., 5th ed. 1984), the Act protects users whose electronic communications are in electronic storage with an ISP or other electronic communications facility.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“An obvious purpose for storing a message on an ISP’s server after delivery is to provide a second copy of the message in the event that the user needs to download it again — if, for example, the message is accidentally erased from the user’s own computer. The ISP copy of the message functions as a “backup” for the user. Notably, nothing in the Act requires that the backup protection be for the benefit of the ISP rather than the user. Storage under these circumstances thus literally falls within the statutory definition.”
3 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.