Fedaa al Najjar Mazen al Najjar v. John Ashcroft Attorney General US Department of Justice’s Empirical Analysis
257 F.3d 1262 · 2001
Citation profile
123 federal appellate · 2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,471 later decisions — most recently May 2025 · most notably Sepulveda v. U.S. Attorney General (2005), Forgue v. U.S. Attorney General (2005)
123 federal appellate · 2 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 Immigration & Naturalization Service v. Elias-Zacarias · Bonner v. City of Prichard · Immigration & Naturalization Service v. Cardoza-Fonseca · Immigration & Naturalization Service v. Doherty · Immigration & Naturalization Service v. Abudu
Cited together with Sepulveda v. U.S. Attorney General · Immigration & Naturalization Service v. Elias-Zacarias · Forgue v. U.S. Attorney General · Adefemi v. Ashcroft · Mendoza v. U.S. Attorney General
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 1,471 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality ... and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of, that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
278 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or her or a third person information or a confession, punishing him or her for an act he or she or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or her or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”
46 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“must affirm the [IJ's] decision if it is supported by reasonable, substantial, and probative evidence on the record considered as a whole.”
30 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.