Baker v. Nelson’s Empirical Analysis
1971
Citation profile
25 federal appellate · 24 district · 57 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 160 later decisions (4 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2021 · most notably 135 S. Ct. 2584 - Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), Prideaux v. State Dept. of Public Safety (1976)
25 federal appellate · 24 district · 57 state decisions — followed in 23 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 Griswold v. State of Connecticut · Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia · Skinner v. State of Oklahoma Williamson · McLaughlin v. Florida · Walker v. City of Birmingham
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 160 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Petitioners note that the state does not impose upon heterosexual married couples a condition that they have a proved capacity or declared willingness to procreate, posing a rhetorical demand that this court must read such condition into the statute if same-sex marriages are to be prohibited. Even assuming [I think the Minnesota court here makes a massive assumption] that such a condition would be neither unrealistic nor offensive under the Gris-wold rationale [Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 , 85 S.Ct. 1678 , 14 L.Ed.2d 510 (1965)], the classification is no more than theoretically imperfect. We are reminded, however, that ‘abstract symmetry’ is not demanded by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“a clear distinction between a marital distinction based merely on race and one based on the fundamental difference in sex.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“Minn.St. c. 517, which governs “marriage,” employs that term as one of common usage, meaning the state of union between persons of the opposite sex. It is unrealistic to think that the original draftsmen of our marriage statutes, which date from territorial days, would have used the term in any different sense.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.