Colgate v. Harvey’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

53 federal appellate · 27 district · 120 state decisions

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 316 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““The reason for this narrow construction of the clause and the consistently exhibited reluctance of this Court to enlarge its scope has been well understood since the decision of the Slaughter-House Cases. If its restraint upon state action were to be extended more than is needful to protect relationships between the citizen and the national government, and if it were to be deemed to extend to those fundamental rights of person and property attached to citizenship by the common law and enactments of the states when the Amendment was adopted, * * * it would enlarge Congressional and judicial control of state action and multiply restrictions upon it whose nature, though difficult to anticipate with precision, would be of sufficient gravity to cause serious apprehension for the rightful independence of local government. That was the issue fought out in the SlaughterHouse Cases, with the decision against enlargement.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. Sharp v. Lucky

2. “Having shown that the privileges and immunities relied on in the argument are those which belong to citizens of the States as such, and that they are left to the State governments for security and protection, and not by this article placed under the special care of the Federal government, we may hold ourselves excused from defining the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States which no State can abridge, until some case involving those privileges may make it necessary to do so. But lest it should be said that no such privileges and immunities are to be found if those we have been considering are excluded, we venture to suggest some which own their existence to the Federal government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws....”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Agre v. Wolf

3. ““The classification, in order to avoid the constitutional prohibition, must be founded upon pertinent and real differences, as distinguished from irrelevant and artificial ones. The test to be applied in such cases as the present one is — does the statute arbitrarily and without genuine reason impose a burden upon one group of taxpayers from which it exempts another group, both of them occupying substantially the same relation toward the subject matter of the legislation?” (Colgate v. Harvey (1935), 296 U.S. 404, 423 , 80 L. Ed. 299, 307 , 56 S. Ct. 252, 256 .)”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Citizens Utilities Co. v. Pollution Control Board