Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. v. Supermarket Equipment Corp.’s Empirical Analysis
340 U.S. 147 · 1950
Citation profile
1,371 federal appellate · 293 district · 9 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 2,618 later decisions (43 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2021 · most notably Graham v. John Deere Company of Kansas City Calmar Inc (1966), Blonder-Tongue Laboratories, Inc. v. University of Illinois Foundation (1971)
1,371 federal appellate · 293 district · 9 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedthe decision below (from Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Applies 35 U.S.C. § 33
Relies on Diamond Rubber Company of New York v. Consolidated Rubber Tire Company · Cuno Engineering Corporation v. Automatic Devices Corporation · Graver Tank & Mfg. Co. v. Linde Air Products Co. · Lincoln Engineering Co of Illinois v. Stewart-Warner Corporation
Cited together with Graham v. John Deere Company of Kansas City Calmar Inc · Lincoln Engineering Co of Illinois v. Stewart-Warner Corporation · Cuno Engineering Corporation v. Automatic Devices Corporation · Anderson's-Black Rock, Inc. v. Pavement Salvage Co. · Graver Tank & Mfg. Co. v. Linde Air Products Co.
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 2,618 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“with a care proportioned to the difficulty and improbability of finding invention in an assembly of old elements.”
216 later decisions quote this exact passage“gadgets that obviously have no place in the constitutional scheme of advancing scientific knowledge”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence““The fact that a patent as flimsy and as spurious as this one has to be brought all the way to this Court to be declared invalid dramatically illustrates how far our patent system frequently departs from the constitutional standards which are supposed to govern.””
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.