Shields v. Burge’s Empirical Analysis
874 F.2d 1201 · 1989
Citation profile
27 federal appellate · 1 district · 4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 51 later decisions — most recently November 2020 · most notably Doe v. Poritz (1995), In re Vitreous Steel Products Co. (1990)
27 federal appellate · 1 district · 4 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. § 2511 (Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986) · 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Anderson v. Creighton · Carroll v. United States · Kentucky v. Graham · Roe v. Wade
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 51 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“... it was not clear that searching the desk as part of an investigation into work-related misconduct (even without a reasonable suspicion that the desk contained evidence) would violate the Fourth Amendment. It is true that several courts, including this one, have held that an employer’s searching or “bugging” an employee’s office, without a warrant or probable cause, violated the Fourth Amendment-[citing cases]. But those cases either involved criminal investigations or were otherwise distinguishable from cases involving only work-related searches.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[A] work-related “workplace” search is lawful if the search is “reasonable [] under all the circumstances.” The plurality explained that a search is reasonable if it is “justified at its inception” and if it is “reasonably related in scope to the circumstances” that justified it. A workplace search to investigate work-related misconduct ordinarily is “justified at its inception” if reasonable grounds exist to suspect that the search will turn up evidence of the employee’s misconduct.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Gustafson v. Adkins“[r]easonableness depends upon the circumstances presented in a given situation and upon balancing the public, governmental, and private interests at stake in that situation.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.