Case Citator › Arizona v. Gant

Arizona v. Gant

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

Criticized by some courts
Court
Supreme Court of the United States
Citation
556 U.S. 332
Decided
Confirmed treatments
2
Flagged citations read
252 of 252
Citing cases (total)
2,723
Treatment dates
2011
Criticized by some courts
At least one reviewed court has criticized this case’s reasoning. No reviewed court has overruled it. Arizona v. Gant remains controlling, but later courts have criticized one point of its reasoning and limited its effect in one setting. All 252 flagged citations have been read.
More on how this was screened

The Supreme Court of Washington called fictional Gant's description of its consistency with earlier vehicle-search precedent while applying Gant's search rule, and the Fifth Circuit declined to apply Gant to suppress evidence from a search conducted before Gant under the good-faith exception. The other opinions applied Gant, reported its history, or discussed unrelated authorities. The two confirmed treatments are listed below.

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.

2,723 later cases cite Arizona v. Gant; 252 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 Arizona v. Gant?

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

Criticized

  • The Supreme Court of Washington criticized Gant's description of its consistency with earlier vehicle-search precedent while applying Gant's search rule.

    State v. Robinson · Supreme Court of Washington · filed

    We do not concede that Gant “did not announce a new rule of law.” Dissent at 308. ... Justice Scalia, however, stated that he found a “4-to-l-to-4 opinion” to be “unacceptable,” so he indulged the fiction that Gant was consistent with Belton and Thornton. ... We are not bound by that fiction in interpreting our procedural rules.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

Limited

  • The Fifth Circuit limited Gant's effect on searches conducted before Gant by applying the good-faith exception and declining to suppress the evidence.

    United States v. Curtis · United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit · filed

    At oral argument, Curtis argued that Edwards’s search of Curtis’s cell phone was unlawful under the new rule announced by the Supreme Court in Arizona v. Gant. ... We need not reach this question. ... assuming for the sake of argument that Gant would have prohibited Edwards’s search of Curtis’s cell phone, we would decline to suppress the text messages under the exclusionary rule’s good-faith exception. ... Three other circuits have declined to use the rule announced in Gant to justify suppressing evidence recovered in searches that took place before the date on which Gant was decided. Jackson dictates that we follow their lead. ... Based solely on the state of the law at the time of the search, we affirm the denial of Curtis’s motion to suppress.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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