Griffin v. State of Maryland’s Empirical Analysis
1964
Citation profile
162 federal appellate · 48 district · 62 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 409 later decisions (33 by the Supreme Court) — most recently May 2025 · most notably Adickes v. S. H. Kress & Co. (1970), West v. Atkins (1988)
162 federal appellate · 48 district · 62 state decisions — followed in 11 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 Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al. · Screws v. United States · Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority · Williams 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 409 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[i]f an individual is possessed of state authority and purports to act under that authority, his action is state action. It is irrelevant that he might have taken the same action had he acted in a purely private capacity or that the particular action which he took was not authorized by state law.”
14 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““may . . . constitutionally enforce an owner’s desire to exclude particular persons from his premises even if the owner’s desire is in turn motivated by a discriminatory purpose. The State, it is said, is not really enforcing a policy of segregation since the owner’s ultimate purpose is immaterial to the State.” 378 U.S. at 136 , 84 S.Ct. at 1773 .”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[t]he State has so far insinuated itself into a position of interdependence with [the restaurant] that it must be recognized as a joint participant in the challenged activity, which, on that account, cannot be considered to have been so "purely private" as to fall without the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment. (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.