Ward v. Utah S’s Empirical Analysis
398 F.3d 1239 · 2005
Citation profile
23 federal appellate · 8 district · 5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 50 later decisions — most recently October 2025 · most notably Dias v. City & County of Denver (2009), Fitzgerald v. Corrections Corp. of America (2005)
23 federal appellate · 8 district · 5 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 Celotex Corporation v. Catrett H · Apprendi v. New Jersey · Broadrick v. Oklahoma · Hoffman Estates v. Flipside, Hoffman Estates, Inc. · Kolender v. Lawson
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 50 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Facial challenges are strong medicine. Article III of the Constitution ensures that federal courts are not “roving commissions assigned to pass judgment on the validity of the nation’s laws,” but instead address only specific “cases” and “controversies.” As the Supreme Court recently observed, “facial challenges are best when infrequent.... Although passing on the validity of a law wholesale may be efficient in the abstract, any gain is often offset by losing the lessons taught by the particular, to which common law method normally looks.” Because facial challenges push the judiciary towards the edge of its traditional purview and expertise, courts must be vigilant in applying a most exacting analysis to such claims.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“[t]he showing that a law punishes a substantial amount of protected speech, judged in relation to the statute's plainly legitimate sweep, suffices to invalidate all enforcement of that law, until and unless a limiting construction or partial invalidation so narrows it as to remove the seeming threat or deterrence to constitutionally protected expression.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“While we do not encourage the practice of granting summary judgment sua sponte, we will not reverse absent evidence of prejudice. So long as “the losing party was on notice that [it] had to come forward with all of [its] evidence, a sua sponte grant of summary judgment may be appropriate.””
1 later decision 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.