United States v. Bell’s Empirical Analysis
762 F.2d 495 · 1985
Citation profile
18 federal appellate · 2 district · 20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 53 later decisions — most recently February 2025 · most notably United States v. Silva (1992), United States v. Heath (2001)
18 federal appellate · 2 district · 20 state decisions — followed in 12 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
Applies 18 U.S.C. § 3731
Relies on Terry v. Ohio · Katz v. United States · United States v. Leon · Chimel v. California · United States v. Cortez
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 53 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[W]e do not believe that the Terry requirement of reasonable suspicion under the circumstances, has been eroded to the point that an individual may be frisked based upon nothing more than an unfortunate choice of associates.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“[T]he agent was not obliged to ignore the fact that [the defendant] was in the company of a man known to be potentially armed and dangerous in assessing the potential risk posed by [the defendant] himself. That is, the fact of companionship, while not itself justifying a frisk, was permissibly considered in analyzing whether there was reasonable cause to believe that [the defendant] was potentially armed and dangerous.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Benton
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.