V Subversive Activities Control Board’s Empirical Analysis
1961
Citation profile
434 federal appellate · 98 district · 181 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,123 later decisions (82 by the Supreme Court) — most recently May 2025 · most notably Buckley v. Valeo (1976), Dombrowski v. Pfister (1965)
434 federal appellate · 98 district · 181 state decisions — followed in 24 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
reviewedCommunist Party of United States v. Subversive Activities Control Board (from District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Applies 15 U.S.C. § 79 (Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935) · 18 U.S.C. § 2385 · 18 U.S.C. § 2386 · 18 U.S.C. § 2424 (White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910 (Mann Act)) · 18 U.S.C. § 3500 · 18 U.S.C. § 612 · 22 U.S.C. § 611 (Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938) · 26 U.S.C. § 101
Relies on Erie Co v. Tompkins · Consolidated Edison Co of New York v. National Labor Relations Board · Ex Parte: Edward T Young · Securities and Exchange Commission v. Chenery Corporation · Boyd v. United States
Cited together with American Communications Ass'n v. Douds · National Association for Advancement of Colored People v. State of Alabama Patterson · Killian v. United States · Galvan v. Press · Scales v. United States
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 1,123 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“never to anticipate a question of constitutional law in advance of the necessity of deciding it.”
41 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“I do not believe that it can be too often repeated that the freedoms of speech, press, petition and assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment must be accorded to the ideas we hate or sooner or later they will be denied to the ideas we cherish.”
13 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“* * * it is not and has never been the law that the privilege disallows the asking of potentially incriminatory questions or authorizes the person of whom they are asked to evade them without expressly asserting that his answers may tend to incriminate him (emphasis added).”
2 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.