Baggett v. Bullitt’s Empirical Analysis
1964
Citation profile
681 federal appellate · 307 district · 360 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 2,474 later decisions (152 by the Supreme Court) — most recently November 2025 · most notably Younger v. Harris (1971), Perry v. Sindermann (1972)
681 federal appellate · 307 district · 360 state decisions — followed in 33 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 Railroad Commission v. Pullman Co. · Connally v. General Construction Co. · Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority · Thornhill v. Alabama · West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette
Cited together with Railroad Commission v. Pullman Co. · Zwickler v. Koota · Dombrowski v. Pfister · National Association for Advancement of Colored People v. Y Button · Younger v. Harris
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 2,474 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The abstention doctrine is not an automatic rule applied whenever a federal court is faced with a doubtful issue of state law; it rather involves a discretionary exercise of a court's equity powers.”
26 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[A] law forbidding or requiring conduct in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application violates due process of law.”
19 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“'steer far wider of the unlawful zone,' . . . than if the boundaries of the forbidden areas were clearly marked.”
17 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.