Arkansas v. Sullivan’s Empirical Analysis
2001
Citation profile
50 federal appellate · 36 district · 174 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 349 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2026 · most notably Devenpeck v. Alford (2004), Zellner v. Summerlin (2007)
50 federal appellate · 36 district · 174 state decisions — followed in 30 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 Whren v. United States · Vasquez v. Hillery · Burnet v. Coronado Oil & Gas Co. · State v. Sullivan · State v. Sullivan
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 349 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“to sanction conduct where a police officer can trail a targeted vehicle with a driver merely suspected of criminal activity, wait for the driver to exceed the speed limit by one mile per hour, arrest the driver for speeding, and conduct a full-blown inventory search of the vehicle with impunity.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Fertig v. State“recognized no constitutional limitation on arrest for a fine-only misdemeanor offense. . . .”
1 later decision 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.