Sullivan v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1986
Citation profile
18 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 18 later decisions — most recently February 2026
18 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
Relies on Schneckloth v. Bustamonte · United States v. Matlock · Bumper v. North Carolina · United States v. Crouthers · Kitchens v. State
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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Common authority is, of course, not to be implied from the mere property interest a third party has in the property. The authority which justifies the third-party consent does not rest upon the law of property with its attendant historical and legal refinements ... but rests rather on mutual use of the property by persons generally having joint access or control for most purposes so that it is reasonable to recognize that any co-inhabitant has the right to permit the inspection in his own right and that the others have assumed the risk that one of their number might permit the area to be searched.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Dyer v. State · Fields v. State
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.