State v. Buchanan’s Empirical Analysis
1968
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 2 district · 7 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 13 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 1985
2 federal appellate · 2 district · 7 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.
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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Apart from the definitional difficulties in attempting to give constitutional status to a privilege for qualified news gatherers which presumably would be denied to less favored classes, there is another objection to discrimination between news gatherers and other persons. Such a practice would be potentially destructive of the very freedom that is sought to be preserved by this appeal. After the lessons of colonial times, the First Amendment required the federal government to resist the normal temptation of rulers to regulate, license, or otherwise pass upon the credentials of those claiming to be authors and publishers. An invitation to the government to grant a special privilege to a special class of ‘news gatherers’ necessarily draws after it an invitation to the government to define the membership of that class. We doubt that all news writers would want the government to pass on the qualifications of those seeking to enter their field. ****** “Assuming that legislators are free to experiment with such definitions, it would be dangerous business for courts, asserting constitutional grounds, to extend to an employe of a ‘respectable’ newspaper a privilege which would be denied to an employe of a disreputable newspaper; or to an episodic pamphleteer; or to a free-lance writer seeking a story to sell on the open market; or, indeed, to a shaggy nonconformist who wishes only to write out his message and nail it to a tree. If the claimed privilege is to be found in the Constit”
1 later decision quote this exact passage““. . . Freedom of the press is a right which belongs to the public; it is not the private preserve of those who possess the implements of publishing. . . .””
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.