Wabash St Ry Co v. State of Illinois’s Empirical Analysis
118 U.S. 557 · 1886
Citation profile
23 federal appellate · 15 district · 75 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 374 later decisions (94 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2019 · most notably Mugler v. State of Kansas State of Kansas Tufts (1887), Smyth v. Ames (1898)
23 federal appellate · 15 district · 75 state decisions — followed in 26 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 Gibbons v. Ogden · Munn v. Illinois · Slaughter-House Cases the Butchers' Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. The Crescent City Live · Brown v. Maryland · John Den James Murray and John Kayser v. The Hoboken Land and Improvement Company John Den James B Murray et al.
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 374 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Commerce with foreign countries and among the states, strictly considered, consists in intercourse and traffic, including in these terms navigation, and the transportation and transit of persons and property, as well as the purchase, sale, and exchange of commodities. For the regulation of commerce, as thus defined, there can be only one system of rules, applicable alike to the whole country; and the authority which can act for the whole country can alone adopt such a system. Action upon it by separate states is not, therefore, permissible.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““The line which separates the power of the states from this exclusive power of Congress is not always distinctly marked, and oftentimes it is not easy to determine on which side a particular case belongs. Judges not (infrequently differ in their reasons for a decision to which they concur. Under such circumstances, it would be a useless task to undertake to fix an arbitrary rule by which the line must, to all cases, be located. It is far better to leave a matter of such delicacy to be settled in each case upon a view of the particular rights involved; but we think it may safely be said that state legislation, which seeks to impose a direct burden upon interstate commerce, or to interfere directly with its freedom, does encroach upon the exclusive power of Congress. * * * The river Mississippi passes through or along the borders of ten different states, and its tributaries reach many more. The commerce upon these waters is immense, and its regulation clearly a matter of national concern. If each state was at liberty to regulate the conduct of carriers while within its jurisdiction, the confusion likely to follow could not but be productive of great inconvenience and unnecessary hardship. Each state could provide for its own passengers, and regulate the transportation of its own freight, regardless of the interest of others. Nay, more, it could prescribe rules by which the carrier must be governed within the state in respect to passengers and property brought from without. On o”
1 later decision quote this exact passage““Por instance, a contract might be made to carry goods for a certain price from Cairo to Chicago, or from Chicago to Alton. The charges for these might be within the competency of the Illinois Legislature to regulate. The reason for this is that both the charge and the actual transportation in such cases are exclusively confined to the limits of the territory of the state, and is not commerce among the states, or interstate commerce, but is exclusively commerce within the state. So far, therefore, as this class of transportation, as an element of commerce, is affected by the statute under consideration, it is not subject to the constitutional provision concerning commerce among the states. It has often been held in this court, and there can be no. doubt about it, that there is a commerce wholly within the state which is not subject to the constitutional provision, and the distinction between commerce among the states and the other class of commerce between the citizens of a single state, and conducted within its limits exclusively, is one which has been fully recognized in this court, although it may not be always easy, where the linos of these classes approach each other, to distinguish between the one and the other.””
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.