Civil Rights Cases’s Empirical Analysis
109 U.S. 3 · 1883
Citation profile
516 federal appellate · 143 district · 231 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,572 later decisions (148 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2026 · most notably Adickes v. S. H. Kress & Co. (1970), Monroe v. Pape (1961)
516 federal appellate · 143 district · 231 state decisions — followed in 40 states
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. A case is still cited after being overruled — to note the reversal, distinguish it, or in dissent. 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 Munn v. Illinois · United States v. Cruikshank · Strauder v. West Virginia · Slaughter-House Cases the Butchers' Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. The Crescent City Live
Cited together with Osborne v. County of Adams · Shelley v. Kraemer · Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority · Moose Lodge No. 107 v. Irvis · Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co.
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 1,572 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(i)ndividual invasion of individual rights is not the subject-matter of the (Fourteenth) amendment”
113 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“§ 1343. Civil rights. "The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action authorized by law to be commenced by any person: * * * * * * "(3) To redress the deprivation, under color of any State law, statute, ordinance, regulation, custom or usage, of any right, privilege or immunity secured by the Constitution of the United States or by any Act of Congress providing for equal rights of citizens or of all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States.”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“. . . What the nation, through Congress, has sought to accomplish in reference to that race, is — what had already been done in every State of the Union for the white race — to secure and protect rights belonging to them as freemen and citizens; nothing more. It was not deemed enough ‘to help the feeble up, but to support him after.’ The one underlying purpose of congressional legislation has been to enable the black race to take the rank of mere citizens. The difficulty has been to compel a recognition of the legal right of the black race to take the rank of citizens, and to secure the enjoyment of privileges belonging, under the law, to them as a component part of the people for whose welfare and happiness government is ordained. At every step, in this direction, the nation has been confronted with class tyranny, which a contemporary English historian says is, of all tyrannies, the most intolerable, ‘for it is ubiquitous in its operation, and weighs, perhaps, most heavily on those whose obscurity or distance would withdraw them from the notice of a single despot.’ Today, it is the colored race which is denied, by corporations and individuals wielding public authority, rights fundamental in their freedom and citizenship. At some future time, it may be that some other race will fall under the ban of race discrimination. If the constitutional amendments be enforced, according to the intent with which, as I conceive, they were adopted, there cannot be, in this republic, any cla”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.