Brown v. Commissioner’s Empirical Analysis
1928
Citation profile
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently January 1974
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
Relies on Norton v. Shelby Co State of Tennessee · Producers' Fuel Co. v. Commissioner · Inland Products Co. v. Commissioner
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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“* * * The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly void, and in legal contemplation is as inoperative as if it had never been passed. Since an unconstitutional law is void, it imposes no duties and confers no power or authority on anyone; it affords protection to no one, and no one is bound to obey it, and no courts are bound to enforce it. When a judgment of any court is based on an unconstitutional law, it has been said that it has no legitimate basis at all, and is not to be treated as a judgment of a competent tribunal, * * *.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.