Shelley v. Kraemer’s Empirical Analysis
334 U.S. 1 · 1948
Citation profile
1,183 federal appellate · 307 district · 1,029 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 3,965 later decisions (215 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2025 · most notably Adickes v. S. H. Kress & Co. (1970), City of Cleburne Texas v. Cleburne Living Center (1985)
1,183 federal appellate · 307 district · 1,029 state decisions — followed in 45 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 Erie Co v. Tompkins · Powell v. State of Alabama Patterson · Cantwell v. State of Connecticut · Yick Wo v. Hopkins · Pennoyer v. Neff
Cited together with Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority · Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al. · Moose Lodge No. 107 v. Irvis · Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co. · Civil Rights Cases
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 3,965 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“rights created by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment are, by its terms, guaranteed to the individual. The rights established are personal rights.”
64 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“erects no shield against merely private conduct, however discriminatory or wrongful.”
47 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The difference between judicial enforcement and non-enforcement of the restrictive covenants is the difference to petitioners between being denied rights of property available to other members of the community and being accorded full enjoyment of those rights on an equal footing.... State action, as that phrase is understood for the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment, refers to exertions of state power in all forms.”
22 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.