Florida v. Mellon’s Empirical Analysis
273 U.S. 12 · 1927
Citation profile
66 federal appellate · 21 district · 52 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 300 later decisions (56 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2025 · most notably Phillips v. Commissioner (1931), South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966)
66 federal appellate · 21 district · 52 state decisions — followed in 14 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 Massachusetts v. Mellon · Brown v. Walker · Ex parte Virginia · Missouri v. Holland · New York Trust Co. v. Eisner
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 300 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The contention that the federal tax is not uniform, because other states impose inheritance taxes while Florida does not, is without merit. Congress cannot accommodate its legislation to the conflicting or dissimilar laws of the several states nor, control the diverse conditions to .be found in the various states whieh necessarily work unlike results from the enforcement of the same tax. All that the Constitution (article 1, § 8, el. 1) requires is that the law shall be uniform in the sense that by its provisions the rule of liability shall be alike in all parts of the United States.””
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“for the protection of its citizens, it is no part of its duty or power to enforce their rights in respect of their relations with the federal government.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Whenever the constitutional powers of the federal government and those of the state come into conflict, the latter must yield,”
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.