Roberts v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
515 federal appellate · 39 district · 463 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,353 later decisions (30 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2025 · most notably Estelle v. Smith (1981), Steagald v. United States (1981)
515 federal appellate · 39 district · 463 state decisions — followed in 44 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
reviewedUnited States v. Roberts (from District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Johnson v. Zerbst · Santobello v. New York · Doyle v. Ohio · McCarthy v. United States
Cited together with Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · United States v. Tucker · Williams v. People of State of New York · United States v. Grayson · Minnesota v. Murphy
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 1,353 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“No limitation shall be placed on the information concerning the background, character, and conduct of a person convicted of an offense which a court of the United States may receive and consider for the purpose of imposing an appropriate sentence.”
50 later decisions quote this exact passage“does not apply outside the context of the inherently coercive custodial interrogations for which it was designed.”
22 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence““[t]he Fifth Amendment privilege against compelled self incrimination is not self-executing. At least where the government has no substantial reason to believe that the requested disclosures are likely to be incriminating, the privilege may not be relied upon unless it is invoked in a timely fashion.””
9 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.