Case Citator › United States v. Winston Bryant McConney

United States v. Winston Bryant McConney

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

Abrogated
Court
Ninth Circuit
Citation
728 F.2d 1195
Decided
Confirmed treatments
2
Flagged citations read
121 of 121
Citing cases (total)
1,819
Treatment dates
1988–1998
Abrogated
A reviewed court treats this case as abrogated by later authority. United States v. Winston Bryant McConney has been abrogated in part: all 121 flagged citations have been read, with the 2 confirmed treatments listed below. Pierce v. Underwood displaced de novo review under McConney's mixed-question framework for the fact-bound determination whether the government's position justified a fee award, requiring abuse-of-discretion review; Estate of Merchant v. Commissioner and later Ninth Circuit opinions recognized that intervening act.
More on how this was screened

United States v. Ramirez separately rejected McConney's rule demanding a greater showing of exigency when officers damage property during entry. The other reviewed opinions applied McConney's surviving standards, reported those higher-court acts in history parentheticals, described McConney's own treatment of older precedent, or rejected a party's contention that McConney impliedly overruled an essentially factual clear-error rule. Four passages that were at first unavailable were later retrieved and 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.

1,819 later cases cite United States v. Winston Bryant McConney; 121 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 United States v. Winston Bryant McConney?

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

Abrogated

  • The Supreme Court displaced McConney's default de novo approach for the fact-bound determination whether the government's position justified a fee award, requiring abuse-of-discretion review.

    Pierce v. Underwood · Supreme Court of the United States · filed

    No more today than in the past shall we attempt to discern or to create a comprehensive test; but we are persuaded that significant relevant factors call for an “abuse of discretion” standard in the present case.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

  • The Supreme Court abrogated McConney's property-based exigency rule, holding that the justification required for entry does not vary according to whether police must damage property.

    United States v. Ramirez · Supreme Court of the United States · filed

    Whether such a “reasonable suspicion” exists depends in no way on whether police must destroy property in order to enter.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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