Yates v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
574 U.S. 528 · 2015
Citation profile
5 federal appellate · 1 district · 13 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 158 later decisions (17 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2026 · most notably Patel v. Garland (2022), United States v. Davis
5 federal appellate · 1 district · 13 state decisions — followed in 10 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 Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Applies 15 U.S.C. § 57B · 16 U.S.C. § 1857 · 16 U.S.C. § 1858 · 18 U.S.C. § 1001 (Comprehensive Thrift and Bank Fraud Prosecution and Taxpayer Recovery Act of 1990) · 18 U.S.C. § 1512 · 18 U.S.C. § 1519 (§ 802 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002) · 18 U.S.C. § 668 (§ 320902 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994) · 18 U.S.C. § 844
Relies on Almendarez-Torres v. United States · Connecticut National Bank v. Germain · Robinson v. Shell Oil Co. · Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc. v. Thompson Ex Rel. Thompson · Vance v. Bradley
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 158 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he ordinary meaning of an 'object' that is 'tangible,' as stated in dictionary definitions, is 'a discrete thing' that 'possesses physical form.' " Id. (citations and brackets omitted). But "[w]hether a statutory term is unambiguous ... does not turn solely on dictionary definitions of its component words .”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“Ordinarily, a word's usage accords with its dictionary definition. In law as in life, however, the same words, placed in different contexts, sometimes mean different things.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“read to cover only objects one can use to record or preserve information, not all objects in the physical world.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.