Donovan v. Dewey’s Empirical Analysis
1981
Citation profile
385 federal appellate · 67 district · 456 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,279 later decisions (37 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2026 · most notably United States v. Leon (1984), Whren v. United States (1996)
385 federal appellate · 67 district · 456 state decisions — followed in 34 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 Payton v. New York · Johnson v. United States · Camara v. Municipal Court of City and County of San Francisco · See v. City of Seattle · Steagald v. United States
Cited together with United States v. Biswell · Marshall v. Barlow's, Inc. · New York v. Burger · See v. City of Seattle · Colonnade Catering Corp. 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 1,279 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“the statute's inspection program, in terms of the certainty and regularity of its application, [must] provid[e] a constitutionally adequate substitute for a warrant.”
118 later decisions quote this exact passage“that the doctrine is essentially defined by 'the pervasiveness and regularity of the federal regulation' and the effect of such regulation upon an owner's expectation of privacy.”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“fails to tailor the scope and frequency of such administrative inspections to the particular”
8 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.