Smith v. Reynolds’s Empirical Analysis
1968
Citation profile
5 district · 7 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 16 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently September 1984
5 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.
Relationships
Applies 42 U.S.C. § 402 (§ 202 of the Social Security Act of 1935) · 8 U.S.C. § 1251 (§ 241 of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (McCarran-Walter))
Relies on McGowan v. State of Maryland Gallagher · Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia · Lindsley v. Natural Carbonic Gas Co. · Flemming v. Nestor · McLaughlin v. Florida
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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is axiomatic that Pennsylvania does save some money now by excluding residents of less than one year. But the constitutional test of equal protection is not satisfied by considerations of minimal financial expediency alone. To be sure, the State may reduce or even eliminate entirely welfare payments if it chooses to conserve resources in this fashion; it may turn all beggars from its doors. But it may not arbitrarily turn away some who are in need while bestowing its charitable favors on others. There must be some otherwise legitimate purpose for excluding members of the class who are in fact deprived of the protection and privileges of existing laws. It is not enough to say that the class is excluded because money is saved.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““[A] State does not violate the Equal Protection Clause merely because the classifications made by its laws are imperfect. If the classification has some ‘reasonable basis,’ it is does not offend the Constitution simply because the classification ‘is not made with mathematical nicety or because in practice it results in some inequality.’ ‘The problems of government are practical ones and may justify, if they do not require, rough accommodations — illogical, it may be, and unscientific.’ ‘A statutory discrimination will not be set aside if any state of facts reasonably may be conceived to justify it.’ ””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority““The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not preclude all state discrimination but only invidious discrimination.””
1 later decision 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.