People v. Belton’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
28 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 37 later decisions — most recently June 2023 · most notably Commonwealth v. White (1995), State v. Wilkins (1997)
28 state decisions
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.
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 37 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In conclusion, then, we hold, that where police have validly arrested an occupant of an automobile, and they have reason to believe that the car may contain evidence related to the crime for which the occupant was arrested or that a weapon may be discovered or a means of escape thwarted, they may contemporaneously search the passenger compartment, including any containers found therein. The search of defendant’s jacket as it lay on the back seat was therefore proper, and the evidence seized admissible. [Emphasis added.]”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. State v. Wheaton
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.