Wells v. Edwards’s Empirical Analysis
1973
Citation profile
101 federal appellate · 3 district · 23 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 208 later decisions (8 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2017 · most notably Chisom v. Roemer (1991), Republican Party of North Carolina v. Martin (1992)
101 federal appellate · 3 district · 23 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 Reynolds v. Sims · Kramer v. Union Free School District No. 15 · Gray v. Sanders · Avery v. Midland County · Hadley v. Junior College District of Metropolitan Kansas City
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 208 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“. . . But in Hadley, as in every other case that we can find dealing with the question of apportionment, the 'governmental functions' involved related to such things as making laws, levying and collecting taxes, issuing bonds, hiring and firing personnel, making contracts, collecting fees, operating schools, and generally managing and governing people. In other words, apportionment cases have always dealt with elected officials who performed legislative or executive type duties . . .”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Driskell v. Edwards“the concept of one-man, one-vote apportionment does not apply to the judicial branch of the government.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Chisom v. Roemer“considerable deviation between the population of some of the judicial districts involved,”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.