Milner v. Apfel’s Empirical Analysis
148 F.3d 812 · 1998
Citation profile
18 federal appellate · 1 district · 2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 32 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently October 2018 · most notably Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Civil Liberties for Urban Believers v. City of Chicago (2003)
18 federal appellate · 1 district · 2 state decisions
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 Gregg v. Georgia · City of Cleburne Texas v. Cleburne Living Center · Lockett v. Ohio · Williamson v. Lee Optical of Oklahoma, Inc. · Bolling v. Sharpe
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 32 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“If a law is challenged as a denial of equal protection, and all that the government can come up with in defense of the law is that the people who are hurt by it happen to be irrationally hated or irrationally feared by a majority of voters, it is difficult to argue that the law is rational if "rational" in this setting is to mean anything more than democratic preference.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Take two cases. In one a reckless driver narrowly misses hitting a child; in the other, a no more reckless driver hits a child. As far as mental state is concerned, both are equally blameworthy; but the second driver will be punished much more heavily. The reason is that the community attaches moral significance to consequences as well as to states of mind.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“How else to explain prohibitions against gambling, prostitution, public nudity and masturbation, fornication, sodomy, the sale of pornography, sexual intercourse with animals, desecration of corpses, and a variety of other 'morals' offenses? A traditional purpose of criminal punishment is to express moral condemnation of the criminal's acts.”
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.