Nash v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
229 U.S. 373 · 1913
Citation profile
446 federal appellate · 163 district · 407 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,553 later decisions (210 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2025 · most notably Connally v. General Construction Co. (1926), Roth v. United States (1957)
446 federal appellate · 163 district · 407 state decisions — followed in 45 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedNash v. United States (from Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Standard Oil Company of New Jersey v. United States · Swift Company v. United States · Hyde v. United States · United States of America v. American Tobacco Co.
Cited together with Connally v. General Construction Co. · United States v. L. Cohen Grocery Co. · International Harvester Company of America v. Commonwealth of Kentucky · Standard Oil Company of New Jersey v. United States · United States v. Petrillo
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 1,553 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“the law is full of instances where a man's fate depends on his estimating rightly ... some matter of degree,”
65 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“the common law understanding of conspiracy 'does not make the doing of any act other than the act of conspiring itself a condition of liability.'”
11 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““As to the suggestion that the matters alleged to have been contemplated would not have constituted an offense if they had been done, it is enough to say that some of them conceivably might have been adequate to accomplish the result, and that the intent alleged would convert what on their face might be no more than ordinary acts of competition or the small dishonesties of trade into a conspiracy of wider scope, as has been explained more than once. Swift & Co. v. United States, 196 U. S. 375 , 396 [ 25 S. Ct. 276 , 49 L. Ed. 518 ]; Loewe v. Lawlor, 208 U. S. 274 , 299 [ 28 S. Ct. 301 , 52 L. Ed. 488 , 13 Ann. Cas. 815]. Of course this fact calls for conscience and circumspection in prosecuting officers, lest by the unfounded charge of a wider purpose than the acts necessarily import they convert what at most would be small lo cal offenses into crimes under the statutes of the United States. But we cannot say, as was the case in United States v. Winslow, 227 U. S. 202 , 218 [ 33 S. Ct. 253 , 57 L. Ed. 481 ], that no intent could convert the proposed conduct into such a crime.” ,”
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.