Great Northern Ry Co v. Sunburst Oil & Refining Co’s Empirical Analysis
287 U.S. 358 · 1932
Citation profile
288 federal appellate · 26 district · 930 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,484 later decisions (81 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2022 · most notably Griffin v. People of the State of Illinois (1956), Linkletter v. Walker (1965)
288 federal appellate · 26 district · 930 state decisions — followed in 50 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 Arizona Grocery Co. v. Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Co. · American Surety Co. v. Baldwin · Brinkerhoff-Faris Trust & Savings Co. v. Hill · Kuhn v. Fairmont Coal Co.
Cited together with Linkletter v. Walker · Chevron Oil Co. v. Huson · Stovall v. Denno · Mapp v. Ohio · Johnson v. State of New Jersey
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 1,484 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A state in defining the limits of adherence to precedent may make a choice for itself between the principle of forward operation and that of relation backward.”
68 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“> “By implication of law there has been written into the (Montana) statute a notice to all concerned that payments exacted by a carrier in conformity with a published tariff were subject to be refunded if found thereafter, upon sufficient evidence, to be excessive and unreasonable.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“the grounds of the decision supply a new and unexpected basis for a claim by the defeated party of the denial of a federal right”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Scott v. Platt
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.