United States v. Williams’s Empirical Analysis
2009
Citation profile
5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently November 2025
5 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.
Relationships
Applies 18 U.S.C. § 1028 (Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act of 1998) · 18 U.S.C. § 1028A · 18 U.S.C. § 1344 · 18 U.S.C. § 1519 (§ 802 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002) · 18 U.S.C. § 982 (§ 1366 of the Money Laundering Control Act of 1986)
Relies on Terry v. Ohio · Illinois v. Gates · Schneckloth v. Bustamonte · United States v. Leon · Carroll 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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another. When [defendant] traveled over the public streets he voluntarily conveyed to anyone who wanted to look the fact that he was traveling over particular roads in a particular direction, the fact of whatever stops he made, and the fact of his final destination when he exited from public roads onto private property.... Visual surveillance from public places along [defendant’s] route ... would have sufficed to reveal all of these facts to the police. The fact that the officers in this case relied not only on visual surveillance, but also on the use of the beeper to signal the presence of [defendant’s] automobile to the police receiver, does not alter the situation. Nothing in the Fourth Amendment prohibited the police from augmenting the sensory faculties bestowed upon them at birth with such enhancement as science and technology afforded them in this case.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.