United States v. Harriss’s Empirical Analysis
1954
Citation profile
1,115 federal appellate · 283 district · 1,565 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 3,823 later decisions (144 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2025 · most notably Monroe v. Pape (1961), Buckley v. Valeo (1976)
1,115 federal appellate · 283 district · 1,565 state decisions — followed in 49 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
reviewedthe decision below (from District of Columbia District Court)
Relationships
Relies on Connally v. General Construction Co. · Cantwell v. State of Connecticut · Screws v. United States · Thornhill v. Alabama
Cited together with Connally v. General Construction Co. · Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville · Lanzetta v. State New Jersey · United States v. National Dairy Products Corp. · Broadrick v. Oklahoma
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 3,823 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The constitutional requirement of definiteness is violated by a criminal statute that fails to give a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice that his contemplated conduct is forbidden by the statute. The underlying principle is that no man shall be held criminally responsible for conduct which he could not reasonably understand to be proscribed.”
148 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“want[ing] only to know who is being hired, who is putting up the money, and how much”
24 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“There are three related manifestations of the fair warning requirement. First, the vagueness doctrine bars enforcement of a statute which either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application. Second, as a sort of junior version of the vagueness doctrine, the canon of strict construction of criminal statutes, or rule of lenity, ensures fair warning by so resolving ambiguity in a criminal statute as to apply it only to conduct clearly covered. Third, although clarity at the requisite level may be supplied by judicial gloss on an otherwise uncertain statute, due process bars courts from applying a novel construction of a criminal statute to conduct that neither the statute nor any prior judicial decision, has fairly disclosed to be within its scope. In each of these guises, the touchstone is whether the statute, either standing alone or as construed, made it reasonably clear at the relevant time that the defendant’s conduct was criminal.”
19 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.