Preisler v. Hearnes’s Empirical Analysis
1962
Citation profile
6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently May 2012
6 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.
Relationships
Relies on Baker v. Carr · Colegrove v. Green · Martin v. Walton · Matter of Sherrill v. . O'Brien · State ex rel. Lamb v. Cunningham
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 10 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[C]ounties are important governmental units, in which the people are accustomed to working together. Therefore, it has always been the policy of this state, in creating districts of more than one county (congressional, judicial or senatorial) to have them composed of entire counties.... We must hold that it was proper for the legislature to follow this policy. In fact, to do otherwise could lead to the most vicious kind of gerrymander. The only departure therefrom in the .1961 Act was in our two largest cities, St. Louis and Kansas City.... Urban conditions may justify this treatment.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage““Therefore, any redistricting agreed upon must always be a compromise. Mathematical exactness is not required or in fact obtainable and a compromise, for which there is any reasonable basis, is an exercise of legislative discretion that the courts must respect.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[Congressional] districts shall be composed of contiguous territory as compact and as nearly equal in population as may be.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.