Michigan v. Long’s Empirical Analysis
1983
Citation profile
1,421 federal appellate · 227 district · 3,016 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 6,183 later decisions (211 by the Supreme Court) — most recently November 2025 · most notably Coleman v. Thompson (1991), Delaware v. Van Arsdall (1986)
1,421 federal appellate · 227 district · 3,016 state decisions — followed in 50 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 Terry v. Ohio · Illinois v. Gates · Carroll v. United States · Brinegar v. United States · Chimel v. California
Cited together with Terry v. Ohio · Harris v. Reed · Pennsylvania v. Mimms · Adams v. Williams · Coleman v. Thompson
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 6,183 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]he search of the passenger compartment of an automobile, limited to those areas in which a weapon may be placed or hidden, is permissible if the police officer possesses a reasonable belief based on “specific and articulable facts which, taken together with the rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant” the officer in believing that the suspect is dangerous and the suspect may gain immediate control of weapons.”
203 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“specific and articulable facts which, taken together with the rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant”
101 later decisions quote this exact passage“fairly appears to rest primarily on federal law, or to be interwoven with the federal law,”
71 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.