Pike v. Walker’s Empirical Analysis
121 F.2d 37 · 1941
Citation profile
5 federal appellate · 6 district ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 15 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 1970
5 federal appellate · 6 district ·
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 Burton v. United States · Public Clearing House v. Coyne · United States Milwaukee Social Democratic Pub Co v. Burleson · Leach v. Carlile
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 15 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““ * * * it is quite true that * * * (in Public Clearing House v. Coyne, 194 U.S. 497 , 24 S.Ct. 789 , 48 L.Ed. 1092 ) * * * the Supreme Court said that the power vested in Congress by the Constitution to establish a postal system is permissive and therefore unlike the grant of power to defend the government against insurrection or foreign invasion or the obligation to protect the life, liberty, and property of the citizen. And from this it deduced the right of Congress to designate what may be carried in the mails and what excluded; to make distinctions between sealed and unsealed letters and packages; to restrict the use to letters and deny it to periodicals; to include periodicals and exclude books; to apply different rates of postage to different articles and prohibit some altogether; and, on the same principle, to forbid the delivery of letters to persons making use of the mails for fraudulent purposes. It may be safely stated, therefore, that no one can claim the right to use the mail for the transmission of matter which Congress has properly declared to be non-mailable, but we think it is equally clear, and is so stated in the Coyne case, that even Congress is without power to extend the benefits of the postal service te one class of persons and deny them to another of the same class. As was said in Burton v. United States, 202 U.S. 344, 371 , 26 S.Ct. 688, 694 , 50 L.Ed. 1057 , the authority of the Post Office Department in the protection of the mail ‘has its sanction ”
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.