Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia’s Empirical Analysis
1967
Citation profile
774 federal appellate · 353 district · 1,161 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 3,691 later decisions (261 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2026 · most notably Roe v. Wade (1973), City of Cleburne Texas v. Cleburne Living Center (1985)
774 federal appellate · 353 district · 1,161 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 Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al. · Meyer v. State of Nebraska · Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority · Shelley v. Kraemer
Cited together with Griswold v. State of Connecticut · Skinner v. State of Oklahoma Williamson · Meyer v. State of Nebraska · Roe v. Wade · Eisenstadt v. Baird
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 3,691 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”
44 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“"No State shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.””
15 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“consistently repudiated 'distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry' as being 'odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality,'”
14 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.