State Ex Rel. Wilkinson v. Murphy’s Empirical Analysis
1939
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 135 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 137 later decisions — most recently November 2010 · most notably Alabama State Federation of Labor v. McAdory (1944), Pickett v. Matthews (1939)
2 federal appellate · 135 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 Mugler v. State of Kansas State of Kansas Tufts · South Carolina v. United States · Helvering v. Gerhardt · Ohio v. Helvering · Ellis v. United States
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 137 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Or to state it differently, all that the legislature is not forbidden to do by the organic law, state or federal, it has full competency to do. And in passing upon the constitutionality of a legislative act, the courts uniformly approach the question with every presumption and intendment in favor of its validity, and seek to sustain rather than strike down the enactment of a co-ordinate branch of the government. All of which is embraced in the simple statement that it is the recognized duty of the court to sustain the act unless it is clear beyond a reasonable doubt that it is violative of the fundamental law. Gray v. Johnson, 235 Ala. 405 , 179 So. 221 ; Walden v. City of Montgomery, 214 Ala. 409 , 108 So. 231 ; Miller v. Marx, 55 Ala. 322 .””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“"[I]t is the peculiar function of the lawmakers to ascertain and determine when the welfare of the people requires the exercise of the State's police powers, and what are appropriate measures to that end, subject only to the power of the courts to adjudge whether any particular law is an invasion of rights secured by the Constitution."”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““The courts, in the exercise of their power to annul a statute which contravenes the organic law, have uniformly recognized that the power is a delicate one, and to be used with great caution. And it must be borne in mind also that legislative power is not derived from either the State or Federal Constitution. These are only limitations upon power. Apart from the limitations imposed by these fundamental charters of government, the power of the legislature has no bounds, and is as plenary as that of the British Parliament.”
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.