Cady v. Dombrowski’s Empirical Analysis
1973
Citation profile
990 federal appellate · 222 district · 2,319 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 4,093 later decisions (67 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2026 · most notably Delaware v. Prouse (1979), United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (1975)
990 federal appellate · 222 district · 2,319 state decisions — followed in 49 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
reviewedChester J. Dombrowski v. Elmer O. Cady (from Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Wong Sun v. United States · Katz v. United States · Carroll v. United States · Mapp v. Ohio · Brinegar v. United States
Cited together with South Dakota v. Opperman · Terry v. Ohio · Chambers v. Maroney · Carroll v. United States · Katz v. United States
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 4,093 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“totally divorced from the detection, investigation, or acquisition of evidence relating to the violation of a criminal statute.”
154 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“a creative judge engaged in post hoc evaluation of police conduct can almost always imagine some alternative means by which the objectives of police might have been accomplished. But “[t]he fact that the protection of the public might, in the abstract, have been accomplished by less intrusive means does not, by itself, render the search unreasonable.””
52 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The ultimate standard set forth in the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness.”
22 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.