McDonald v. Brewer’s Empirical Analysis
1968
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 3 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 9 later decisions — most recently April 1984
2 federal appellate · 3 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
Relies on Lindsley v. Natural Carbonic Gas Co. · Zwickler v. Koota · Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County · Douglas v. City of Jeannette · Cameron v. Johnson
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 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Reverting then to the question of whether a state may constitutionally prohibit persons who buy legal taxpaid whiskey in ‘wet’ counties, from possessing such whiskey in ‘dry’ counties, in our opinion, at this late date, the decision of that question requires no more than a very brief reference to earlier cases. It has long been settled that a state may decline to consider intoxicating liquor as a legitimate article of commerce and may prohibit its possession or sale either absolutely or under such reasonable conditions as the state may prescribe. Crowley v. Christensen, 1890, 137 U.S. 86, 91, 92 , 11 S.Ct. 13 , 34 L.Ed. 620 ; Crane v. Campbell, 1917, 245 U.S. 304, 307 , 38 S.Ct. 98 , 62 L.Ed. 304 ; Ziffrin v. Reeves, 1939, 308 U.S. 132, 138 , 60 S.Ct. 163 , 84 L.Ed. 128 . As far back as 1904, the Supreme Court declared that the power of a state to pass a local option law ‘is not an open question.’ Lloyd v. Dollison, 1904, 194 U.S. 445, 448, 449 , 24 S.Ct. 703 , 48 L.Ed. 1062 . See also, Rippey v. Texas, 1904, 193 U.S. 504 , 24 S.Ct. 516 , 48 L.Ed. 767 . Nothing that has occurred since has impaired the soundness of that statement. * * * The Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution has recognized the police power of the states over intoxicating liquors. We find no sound basis for the plaintiffs’ constitutional arguments. We hold that it is not violative of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution for the State of Alabama to prohibit persons wh”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Smith v. Potts
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.