Smith v. People of the State of California’s Empirical Analysis
1959
Citation profile
514 federal appellate · 118 district · 927 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 2,285 later decisions (222 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 2024 · most notably Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964)
514 federal appellate · 118 district · 927 state decisions — followed in 47 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
Applies 28 U.S.C. § 1257
Relies on Boyd v. United States · Morissette v. United States · Roth v. United States · Thornhill v. Alabama · West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette
Cited together with Roth v. United States · Miller v. California · New York Times Co. v. Sullivan · National Association for Advancement of Colored People v. Y Button · Dombrowski v. Pfister
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 2,285 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“any form of criminal obscenity statute applicable to a bookseller will induce some tendency to self-censorship and have some inhibitory effect on the dissemination of material not obscene.”
90 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““ * * * Since the law through its functionaries is ‘applying contemporary community standards’ in determining what constitutes obscenity, * * * it surely must be deemed rational, and therefore relevant to the issue of obscenity, to allow light to be shed on what those ‘contemporary community standards’ are. Their interpretation ought not to depend solely on the necessarily limited, hit-or-miss, subjective view of what they are believed to be by the individual juror or judge. * * * ””
11 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“The community cannot, where liberty of speech and press are at issue, condemn that which it generally tolerates.”
4 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.