Case Citator › Abel v. United States

Abel v. United States

Is it still good law? What later courts have actually done to this case.

Limited by some courts
Court
Supreme Court of the United States
Citation
362 U.S. 217
Decided
Confirmed treatments
1
Flagged citations read
46 of 46
Citing cases (total)
46
Treatment dates
1969
Limited by some courts
At least one reviewed court has limited this case’s holding to narrower facts or a narrower rule. No reviewed court has overruled it. Abel v. United States is limited on the scope of a search incident to arrest. Chimel v. California confined such searches to the arrested person and the area within reach, superseding the broad room search rationale Abel drew from Harris and Rabinowitz.
More on how this was screened

Abel's rulings on good-faith cooperation between immigration and criminal investigators and on abandoned property were not displaced by that decision. All 46 flagged citations have been read.

Every treatment on this page is written from the citing opinion itself, with a verbatim quote, never copied from a commercial citator. A citation flagged by our screen but not shown here was read and found not to weaken this case.

46 later cases cite Abel v. United States; 46 of those citations sat close to treatment language and were flagged for reading, and all of them have been read. Citations that did not sit near treatment language were not flagged and were not read one by one, so a court that weakened this case without using any of that language would not appear here.

Relying on Abel v. United States?

This page shows what later courts did to it. Ask about your specific facts and see whether it still carries your argument, with citations you can check.

Treatments

Limited

  • The Supreme Court confined the broad search incident to arrest rationale used in Abel to the arrested person and the area within reach.

    Chimel v. California · Supreme Court of the United States · filed

    There is no comparable justification, however, for routinely searching any room other than that in which an arrest occurs — or, for that matter, for searching through all the desk drawers or other closed or concealed areas in that room itself. Such searches, in the absence of well-recognized exceptions, may be made only under the authority of a search warrant. ... Decisions of this Court since Rabinowitz have applied the abstract doctrine of that case to various factual situations with divergent results. Compare Ker v. California, 374 U. S. 23, 42; Abel v. United States, 362 U. S. 217; and Draper v. United States, 358 U. S. 307, with Kremen v. United States, 353 U. S. 346 (per curiam).
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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