Ferrell v. Dallas Independent School District’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

218 federal appellate · 12 district · 69 state decisions

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 398 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “It comes as a surprise that in a country where the States are restrained by an Equal Protection Clause, a person can be denied education in a public school because of the length of his hair. I suppose that a nation bent on turning out robots might insist that every male have a crew cut and every female wear pigtails. But the ideas of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” expressed in the Declaration of Independence, later found specific definition in the Constitution itself, including of course freedom of expression and a wide zone of privacy. I had supposed those guarantees permitted idiosyncrasies to flourish, especially when they concern the image of one’s personality and his philosophy toward government and his fellow men. [ 393 U.S. 856 , 89 S.Ct. 98 .]”

   3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. Bishop v. Colaw · Akridge v. Barres