Markham v. Cabell’s Empirical Analysis
326 U.S. 404 · 1945
Citation profile
445 federal appellate · 53 district · 207 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,114 later decisions (53 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2025 · most notably Chapman v. United States (1991), Watt v. Alaska (1981)
445 federal appellate · 53 district · 207 state decisions — followed in 26 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedCabell v. Markham (from Second Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Applies 50 U.S.C. § 4309
Relies on Rector Etc of Holy Trinity Church v. United States · Cabell v. Markham
Cited together with Cabell v. Markham · Rector Etc of Holy Trinity Church v. United States · United States v. American Trucking Associations · Watt v. Alaska · Clark v. Uebersee Finanz-Korp.
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 1,114 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“it is one of the surest indexes of a mature and developed jurisprudence not to make a fortress out of the dictionary; but to remember that statutes always have some purpose or object to accomplish, whose sympathetic and imaginative discovery is the surest guide to their meaning.”
43 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““The policy as well as the letter of the law is a guide to decision.””
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[T]he normal assumption is that where Congress amends only one section of a law, leaving another untouched, the two were designed to function as parts of an integrated whole.”
4 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.