Mescalero Apache Tribe v. Jones’s Empirical Analysis
1973
Citation profile
386 federal appellate · 138 district · 418 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,332 later decisions (94 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2024 · most notably Morton v. Mancari (1974), United States v. Wheeler (1978)
386 federal appellate · 138 district · 418 state decisions — followed in 30 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 M'Culloch v. State of Maryland · Williams v. Lee · McClanahan v. State Tax Commission of Arizona · Samuel Worcester v. The State of Georgia
Cited together with McClanahan v. State Tax Commission of Arizona · Williams v. Lee · Moe v. Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation · White Mountain Apache Tribe v. Bracker · Washington v. Confederated Tribes of the Colville Indian Reservation
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 1,332 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Absent express federal law to the contrary, Indians going beyond reservation boundaries have generally been held subject to nondiscriminatory state law otherwise applicable to all citizens of the State.”
40 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The upshot has been the repeated statements of this Court to the effect that, even on reservations, state laws may be applied unless such application would interfere with reservation self-government or would impair a right granted or reserved by federal law.”
31 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“intent and purpose . . . was 'to rehabilitate the Indian's economic life and to give him a chance to develop the initiative destroyed by a century of oppression and paternalism.'”
7 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.