Jones v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
137 U.S. 202 · 1890
Citation profile
163 federal appellate · 44 district · 71 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 494 later decisions (77 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2025 · most notably Baker v. Carr (1962), Massachusetts v. Mellon (1923)
163 federal appellate · 44 district · 71 state decisions — followed in 22 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 United States v. Hudson · Brown v. Piper · Runkle v. United States · James Foster v. David Neilson
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 494 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[w]ho is the sovereign, de jure or de facto, of a territory, is not a judicial, but a political, question, the determination of which by the legislative and executive departments of any government conclusively binds the judges, as well as all other officers, citizens, and subjects of that government.”
13 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“It has been specifically decided that `Who is the sovereign, de jure or de facto, of a territory is not a judicial, but is a political question, the determination of which by the legislative and executive departments of any government conclusively binds the judges, as well as all other officers, citizens and subjects of that government.'”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage““By the Constitution of the United States, while a crime committed within any state must be tried in that state and in a district previously ascertained by law, yet a crime not committed within any state of the Union may be tried at such place as Congress may by law have directed.””
2 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.