Roe v. Wade’s Empirical Analysis
1973
Citation profile
2,606 federal appellate · 966 district · 3,613 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 10,479 later decisions (309 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2026 · most notably Warth v. Seldin (1975), Bell v. Wolfish (1979)
2,606 federal appellate · 966 district · 3,613 state decisions — followed in 50 states
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. A case is still cited after being overruled — to note the reversal, distinguish it, or in dissent. 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 Terry v. Ohio · Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth · Katz v. United States · Younger v. Harris · Baker v. Carr
Cited together with Griswold v. State of Connecticut · Doe v. Bolton · Southern Pacific Terminal Company v. Interstate Commerce Commission · Eisenstadt v. Baird · Meyer v. State of Nebraska
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 10,479 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“implicit in the concept of ordered liberty”
463 later decisions quote this exact passage“capable of repetition, yet evading review.”
102 later decisions quote this exact passage“If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”
15 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.