United States v. Williams’s Empirical Analysis
41 F.3d 192 · 1994
Citation profile
18 federal appellate · 1 district · 10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 43 later decisions — most recently August 2025 · most notably 215 Ill. 2d 261 - People v. Jones (2005), United States v. Green (2010)
18 federal appellate · 1 district · 10 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
Applies 21 U.S.C. § 841 (§ 401 of the Controlled Substances Act)
Relies on Glasser v. United States · Wong Sun v. United States · Texas v. Brown · Horton v. California · United States v. Jacobsen
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 43 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[I]n the realm of nonconstitutional error, the appropriate test of harmlessness ... is whether we can say with fair assurance, after pondering all that happened without stripping the erroneous action from the whole, that the judgment was not substantially swayed by the error.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[e]ven when government agents may lawfully seize ... a package to protect loss or destruction of suspected contraband, the Fourth Amendment requires that they obtain a warrant before examining the contents of such a package”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[A]lthough the plain view doctrine may support the warrantless seizure of a container believed to contain contraband, any subsequent search of its concealed contents must either be accompanied by a search warrant or justified by one of the exceptions to the warrant requirement. See [U.S. v.] Jacobsen, 466 U.S. [109] at 114, 104 S.Ct. [1652] at 1657 [ 80 L.Ed.2d 85 (1984) ] ("[e]ven when government agents may lawfully seize ... a package to protect loss or destruction of suspected contraband, the Fourth Amendment requires that they obtain a warrant before examining the contents of such a package") (footnote omitted); Texas v. Brown, 460 U.S. 730 at 749-51, 103 S.Ct. 1535 at 1547-48, 75 L.Ed.2d 502 (1983) (Stevens, J., concurring) (plain view doctrine supports the warrantless seizure of a closed container but not the warrantless search of its contents that were not visible to the police ); United States v. Corral, 970 F.2d 719 , 725 (10th Cir. 1992) ("In cases involving closed containers ... the plain view doctrine may support the warrantless seizure of a container believed to contain contraband but any subsequent search of the concealed contents of the container must be accompanied by a warrant or justified by one of the exceptions to the warrant requirement."). Courts have drawn a distinction between the plain view seizure of a container and the subsequent search of that container, because its seizure under the plain view doctrine "does not compromise the interest in preservi”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. State v. Johnson
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.