Baxstrom v. Herold’s Empirical Analysis
1966
Citation profile
290 federal appellate · 78 district · 688 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,336 later decisions (53 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2025 · most notably Vitek v. Jones (1980), Kansas v. Hendricks (1997)
290 federal appellate · 78 district · 688 state decisions — followed in 41 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 Walters v. City of St. Louis · Burlington Truck Lines, Inc. v. United States · Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers v. Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad · Knowles v. Florida
Cited together with Jackson v. Indiana · Humphrey v. Cady · Specht v. Patterson · Addington v. Texas · O'Connor v. Donaldson
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 1,336 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Equal protection does not require that all persons be dealt with identically, but it does require that a distinction made have some relevance to the purpose for which the classification is made.”
59 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Parham v. J. R. · Cameron v. Mullen““We hold that petitioner was denied equal protection of the laws by the statutory procedure under which a person may be civilly committed at the expiration of his penal sentence without the jury review available to all other persons civilly committed in New York. Petitioner was further denied equal protection of the laws by his civil commitment to an institution maintained by the Department of Correction beyond the expiration of his prison term without a judicial determination that he is dangerously mentally ill such as that afforded to all so committed except those, like Baxstrom, nearing the expiration of a penal sentence.””
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“It follows that the State, having made this substantial review proceeding generally available on this [the commitment] issue, may not, consistent with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, arbitrarily withhold it from ... [others].”
3 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.