Smith v. Mitchell’s Empirical Analysis
1899
Citation profile
5 federal appellate · 2 district · 43 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 52 later decisions — most recently November 2011 · most notably Sierra Club v. Hodel (1988), Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance v. Bureau of Land Management (2005)
5 federal appellate · 2 district · 43 state decisions — followed in 11 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 Flint & Pere Marquette Railway Co. v. Gordon · State v. Horlacher
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 52 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The act of congress already referred to [R.S. 2477] does not make any distinction as to the methods recognized by law for the establishment of a highway. It is an unequivocal grant of right of way for highways over public lands, without any limitation as to the method for their establishment, and hence a highway may be established across or upon such public lands in any of the ways recognized by the law of the state in which such lands are located; and in this state, as already observed, such highways may be established by prescription, dedication, user, or proceedings under the statute.”
1 later decision 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.