Case Citator › Berger v. New York

Berger v. New York

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
388 U.S. 41
Decided
Confirmed treatments
1
Flagged citations read
53 of 53
Citing cases (total)
53
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. Berger v. New York is limited. All 53 flagged citations have been read.
More on how this was screened

In Kaiser v. New York, the Supreme Court confined Berger's ruling on the New York surveillance statute to intrusions into a constitutionally protected area. That confirmed treatment is listed below. Seven available citing opinions contain no citation to Berger in their full text; the apparent associations do not establish treatment. A separate district court order discussing Berger was reversed on appeal and is not counted as a treatment.

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.

53 later cases cite Berger v. New York; 53 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 Berger v. New York?

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 held that Berger had not displaced the prior rule permitting a wiretap without physical intrusion into the speaker's protected area; it upheld evidence from a wiretap conducted before Katz v. United States.

    Kaiser v. New York · Supreme Court of the United States · filed

    That rule was not modified by Berger v. New York. The Court's discussion of Olmstead in Berger, while recognizing that other cases had negated the statements in Olmstead that conversations are never protected by the Fourth Amendment, cast no doubt upon “[t]he basis of the [Olmstead] decision” — “that the Constitution did not forbid the obtaining of evidence by wiretapping unless it involved actual unlawful entry into the house.”7 Furthermore, the Court in Berger found the overbreadth of N. Y. Code Crim. Proc. § 813-a repugnant to the Fourth Amendment only to the limited extent that it permitted a “trespassory intrusion into a constitutionally protected area.” 8
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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