Gulf Ry Co v. Ellis’s Empirical Analysis
165 U.S. 150 · 1897
Citation profile
63 federal appellate · 70 district · 559 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,077 later decisions (110 by the Supreme Court) — most recently September 2020 · most notably Dandridge v. Williams (1970), San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973)
63 federal appellate · 70 district · 559 state decisions — followed in 46 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 Boyd v. United States · Yick Wo v. Hopkins · Hayes v. State of Missouri · Bell's Gap Railroad v. Pennsylvania
Cited together with Connolly v. Union Sewer Pipe Co. · Atchison Co v. Matthews · Yick Wo v. Hopkins · Magoun v. Illinois Trust & Savings Bank · Charles Cotting v. A a Godard
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 1,077 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“can never be made arbitrarily and without any such basis. . . . (A)rbitrary selection can never be justified by calling it classification.”
20 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“must always rest upon some difference which bears a reasonable and just relation to the act in respect to which the classification is proposed, and can never be made arbitrarily and without any such basis.”
12 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““They do not enter the courts upon equal terms. They must pay attorney’s fees, if wrong; they do not recover any, if right; while their adversaries recover, if right, and pay nothing, if wrong.””
7 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.