United States v. Sprague’s Empirical Analysis
282 U.S. 716 · 1931
Citation profile
35 federal appellate · 17 district · 80 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 207 later decisions (30 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 2024 · most notably Baker v. Carr (1962), District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)
35 federal appellate · 17 district · 80 state decisions — followed in 16 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 Gibbons v. Ogden · Brown v. Maryland · Martin Fairfax v. Hunter's · Lake County v. Rollins · Dodge v. Woolsey
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 207 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“we are guided by the principle that '[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning.'”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“It added nothing to the instrument as originally ratified....”
3 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.