WILWORDING Et Al. v. SWENSON, WARDEN’s Empirical Analysis
1971
Citation profile
651 federal appellate · 141 district · 55 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,514 later decisions (50 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 2020 · most notably Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth (1972), Wolff v. McDonnell (1974)
651 federal appellate · 141 district · 55 state decisions — followed in 15 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedWilwording v. Swenson (from Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Applies 28 U.S.C. § 1343 · 28 U.S.C. § 2254 (Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996) · 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Monroe v. Pape · Fay v. Noia · Brown v. Allen · Johnson v. Avery · McNeese v. Board of Education for Community Unit School District 187 Cahokia
Cited together with Picard v. Connor · Fay v. Noia · Preiser v. Rodriguez · Haines v. Kerner · Monroe v. Pape
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 1,514 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“'the State the initial opportunity to pass upon and correct alleged violations of its prisoners' federal rights.'”
34 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“is supplementary to the state remedy, and the latter need not be first sought and refused before the federal one is invoked.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“State prisoners are not held to any stricter standard of exhaustion than other civil rights plaintiffs.”
4 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.