United States v. Johnson’s Empirical Analysis
413 F.2d 1396 · 1969
Citation profile
75 federal appellate · 21 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 106 later decisions — most recently December 2003 · most notably 95 Wash. 2d 170 - State v. Simpson (1980), United States v. Forrest (1980)
75 federal appellate · 21 state decisions — followed in 14 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.
Relationships
Relies on Katz v. United States · Cooper v. State of California · Amos v. United States · United Gas Improvement Co. v. Continental Oil Co. · Pierson v. Ray
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 106 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[The officer’s] cheeking of the number of the vehicle was mere routine. In this highly motorized age with millions of vehicles traversing the nation’s highways and the mounting number of automobile thefts and related crimes, it would tax the imagination if we were to consider under these circumstances that a visual inspection by [a police officer] of a car identification number constituted a search, much less an illegal search. The Fourth Amendment constitutional prohibition is against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. Geissler“* * * This agent had the serial number and the motor number of Johnson’s blue Corvette, taken from a confidential location on the frame of the vehicle. By the use of gasoline he cleaned off the numbers, rubbed fingerprint ink over them, laid over a piece of scotch tape, picked up the ink, laid it across a white piece of paper, and by that method could read the number. * * *”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Wright v. State
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.