Douglas v. Alabama’s Empirical Analysis
1965
Citation profile
912 federal appellate · 91 district · 1,978 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 3,587 later decisions (98 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2026 · most notably Boykin v. Alabama (1969), Crawford v. Washington (2004)
912 federal appellate · 91 district · 1,978 state decisions — followed in 50 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 Pointer v. Texas · Mattox v. United States · Douglas v. Alabama · V The Board of Higher Education of the City of New York
Cited together with Pointer v. Texas · Bruton v. United States · California v. Green · Davis v. Alaska · Chapman v. State of California
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 3,587 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“inferences from a witness' refusal to answer added critical weight to the prosecution's case in a form not subject to cross-examination, and thus unfairly prejudiced the defendant.”
103 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[u]nder the guise of cross-examination to refresh Loyd's recollection, the [prosecutor] purported to read from the [written confession].”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“to bring the alleged federal error to the attention of the trial court and enable it to take appropriate corrective action.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Shaffer v. State · Osborne v. Ohio
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.