Konigsberg v. State Bar of Cal.’s Empirical Analysis
1961
Citation profile
242 federal appellate · 59 district · 289 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 884 later decisions (109 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2026 · most notably New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), District of Columbia Court of Appeals v. Feldman (1983)
242 federal appellate · 59 district · 289 state decisions — followed in 30 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 Boyd v. United States · Roth v. United States · National Association for Advancement of Colored People v. State of Alabama Patterson · Chaplinsky v. State of New Hampshire · West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette
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 884 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“certain forms of speech, or speech in certain contexts, has been considered outside the scope of constitutional protection,”
13 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“the equally unqualified command of the Second Amendment”
4 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.