Bouie v. City of Columbia’s Empirical Analysis
1964
Citation profile
1,050 federal appellate · 138 district · 1,282 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 3,247 later decisions (93 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2025 · most notably Hamling v. United States (1974), Brown v. Ohio (1977)
1,050 federal appellate · 138 district · 1,282 state decisions — followed in 49 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 Connally v. General Construction Co. · Cantwell v. State of Connecticut · National Association for Advancement of Colored People v. State of Alabama Patterson · United States v. Harriss
Cited together with Marks v. United States · Rogers v. Tennessee · United States v. Harriss · Connally v. General Construction Co. · Strickland v. Washington
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 3,247 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“unexpected and indefensible by reference to the law which had been expressed prior to the conduct in issue,”
168 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The constitutional requirement of definiteness is violated by a criminal statute that fails to give a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice that his contemplated conduct is forbidden by the statute. The underlying principle is that no man shall be held criminally responsible for conduct which he could not reasonably understand to be proscribed.”
37 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““The case must be a strong one indeed, which would justify a Court in departing from the plain meaning of words, especially in a penal act, in search of an intention which the words themselves did not suggest. To determine that a case is within the intention of a statute, its language must authorize us to say so [United States v. Wiltberger, 5 Wheat. 76 , 96, 5 L.Ed. 37 ].’’”
6 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.