O'CONNOR v. Ortega’s Empirical Analysis
1987
Citation profile
640 federal appellate · 195 district · 381 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,956 later decisions (44 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2026 · most notably Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives' Assn. (1989), Griffin v. Wisconsin (1987)
640 federal appellate · 195 district · 381 state decisions — followed in 38 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
reviewedthe decision below (from Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Applies 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Terry v. Ohio · Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Katz v. United States · Brinegar v. United States · Rakas v. Illinois
Cited together with New Jersey v. T. L. O. · Katz v. United States · Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives' Assn. · National Treasury Employees Union v. Von Raab · Griffin v. Wisconsin
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 1,956 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he operational realities of the workplace,”
96 later decisions quote this exact passage“special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement, make the warrant and probable-cause requirement impracticable.”
21 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“Determining the reasonableness of any search involves a twofold inquiry: first, one must consider 'whether the ... action was justified at its inception,' ...; second, one must determine whether the search as actually conducted 'was reasonably related in scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place,'....”
19 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.