Williams v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
1971
Citation profile
508 federal appellate · 42 district · 488 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,324 later decisions (91 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2018 · most notably Illinois v. Gates (1983), Coolidge v. New Hampshire (1971)
508 federal appellate · 42 district · 488 state decisions — followed in 41 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
reviewedWilliams v. United States (from Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Applies 28 U.S.C. § 2255 (Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996)
Relies on Terry v. Ohio · Katz v. United States · In the Matter of Samuel Winship · Gideon v. Wainwright · Bruton v. United States
Cited together with Linkletter v. Walker · Stovall v. Denno · Desist v. United States · Johnson v. State of New Jersey · 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 1,324 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Where the major purpose of new constitutional doctrine is to overcome an aspect of the criminal trial that substantially impairs its truth-finding function and so raises serious questions about the accuracy of guilty verdicts in past trials, the new rule has been given complete retroactive effect. Neither good-faith reliance by state or federal authorities on prior constitutional law or accepted practice, nor severe impact on the administration of justice has sufficed to require prospective application in these circumstances.”
54 later decisions quote this exact passage“First, the decision to be applied nonretroactively must establish a new principle of law, either by overruling clear past precedent on which litigants may have relied, ... or by deciding an issue of first impression whose resolution was not clearly foreshadowed .... Second, it has been stressed that “we must . weigh the merits and demerits in each case by looking to the prior history of the rule in question, its purpose and effect, and whether retrospective operation will further or retard its operation.” . . Finally, we have weighed the inequity imposed by retroactive application, for “[wjhere a decision of this Court could produce substantial inequitable results if applied retroactively, there is ample basis in our cases for avoiding the ‘injustice or hardship’ by a holding of nonretroactivity.””
7 later decisions quote this exact passage“[There is] a three-fold analysis directed at discovering : “(a) the purpose to be served by the new standards, (b) the extent of reliance by law enforcement authorities on the old standards, and (c) the effect on the administration of justice of a retroactive application of the new standards.””
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.