Minnesota v. Dickerson’s Empirical Analysis
1993
Citation profile
597 federal appellate · 162 district · 2,490 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 4,021 later decisions (9 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2026 · most notably Spencer v. Kemna (1998), Richards v. Wisconsin (1997)
597 federal appellate · 162 district · 2,490 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.
Relationships
Relies on Terry v. Ohio · Katz v. United States · Carroll v. United States · Mapp v. Ohio · Coolidge v. New Hampshire
Cited together with Terry v. Ohio · Horton v. California · Adams v. Williams · Michigan v. Long · 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 4,021 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“If a police officer lawfully pats down a suspect’s outer clothing and feels an object whose contour or mass makes its identity immediately apparent, there has been no invasion of the suspect’s privacy beyond that already authorized by the officer’s search for weapons; if the object is contraband, its warrantless seizure would be justified by the same practical considerations that inhere in the plain-view context.”
354 later decisions quote this exact passage“Although the officer was lawfully in a position to feel the lump in respondent’s pocket, because Terry entitled him to place his hands upon respondent’s jacket, the court below determined that the incriminating character of the object was not immediately apparent to him. Rather, the officer determined that the item was contraband only after conducting a further search, one not authorized by Terry or by any other exception to the warrant requirement. Because this further search of respondent’s pocket was constitutionally invalid, the seizure of the cocaine that followed is likewise unconstitutional.”
18 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“It is always somewhat dangerous to ground exceptions to constitutional protections in the social norms of a given historical moment. The purpose of the Fourth Amendment's requirement of reasonableness `is to preserve that degree of respect for the privacy of persons and the inviolability of their property that existed when the provision was adopted — even if a later, less virtuous age should become accustomed to considering all sorts of intrusion”
5 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.