United States Burnett v. Teller’s Empirical Analysis
107 U.S. 64 · 1882
Citation profile
40 federal appellate · 11 district · 53 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 151 later decisions (12 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2025 · most notably Lynch v. United States (1934), Frisbie v. United States (1895)
40 federal appellate · 11 district · 53 state decisions — followed in 15 states
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 Walton v. Cotton
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 151 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“No pensioner has a vested legal right to his pension. Pensions are the bounties of the government, which Congress has the right to give, withhold, distribute, or recall, at its discretion. Walton v. Cotton, 19 How. 355 .”
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.