Rabe v. Washington’s Empirical Analysis
1972
Citation profile
67 federal appellate · 7 district · 52 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 199 later decisions (20 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2026 · most notably Miller v. California (1973), Marks v. United States (1977)
67 federal appellate · 7 district · 52 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.
Relationships
Relies on Roth v. United States · Cohen v. California · Book Named 'John Cleland's Memoirs of Woman of Pleasure' v. Attorney General of Commonwealth of Massachusetts · Cole v. State of Arkansas · Garner v. State of Louisiana Briscoe
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 199 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(t)o avoid the constitutional vice of vagueness, it is necessary, at a minimum, that a statute give fair notice that certain conduct is proscribed.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““Public displays of explicit materials such as are described in this record are not significantly different from any noxious public nuisance traditionally within the power of the States to regulate and prohibit, and, in my view, involve no significant countervailing First Amendment considerations.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Conners v. Riley““We hold simply that a State may not criminally punish the exhibition at a drive-in theater of a motion picture where the statute, used to support the conviction, has not given fair notice that the location of the exhibition was a vital element of the offense.””
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.