United States v. Larkin’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

50 federal appellate · 7 state decisions

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 64 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Nothing about the described features of the car or its direction points to anything suspicious, let alone criminal. That a vehicle matching the description was spotted, along a highway from El Centro in the general direction of Los Angeles corroborates nothing except, possibly, the ability of the informant accurately to relay what he has seen or what he has overheard. No hint is given thereby that the informant was truthful in reporting that the vehicle contained contraband. Nor does the observation supply any information about how the informant knew that contraband was being transported. The fact that these few innocuous details tallied with the officers’ observations cannot “be said to support both the inference that the informer was generally trustworthy and that he had made his charge against [Larkin] on the basis of information obtained in a reliable way. 510 F.2d at 15 , quoting from Spineiii, supra at 417, 89 S.Ct. at 589 .”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Jenkins v. State

2. “a confrontation with a vehicular blockade and drawn weapons cannot be equated with an investigative detention”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. United States v. White