Fortson v. Toombs’s Empirical Analysis
1965
Citation profile
12 federal appellate · 4 district · 9 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 39 later decisions (6 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2001 · most notably Fortson v. Morris (1966), Terrazas v. Ramirez (1991)
12 federal appellate · 4 district · 9 state decisions
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 Baker v. Carr · Reynolds v. Sims · Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority · United States v. Munsingwear, Inc. · Southern Pacific Terminal Company v. Interstate Commerce Commission
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 39 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“As to the provisions forbidding submission to the electorate of a legislatively proposed new state constitution, I can find nothing in the Fourteenth Amendment, elsewhere in the Constitution, or in any decision of this Court, which requires a State to initiate complete or partial constitutional change only by some method in which every voice in the voting population is given an opportunity to express itself. Can there be the slightest constitutional doubt that a State may lodge the power to initiate constitutional changes in any select body it pleases, such as a committee of the legislature, a group of constitutional lawyers, or even a 'malapportioned' legislature . . . .”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Driskell v. Edwards
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.