Frontiero v. Richardson’s Empirical Analysis
1973
Citation profile
636 federal appellate · 275 district · 806 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 2,755 later decisions (168 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2026 · most notably City of Cleburne Texas v. Cleburne Living Center (1985), Cannon v. University of Chicago (1979)
636 federal appellate · 275 district · 806 state decisions — followed in 47 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
Applies 10 U.S.C. § 1071 (Military Health Care Amendments of 1987) · 10 U.S.C. § 1072 · 10 U.S.C. § 1076 · 1 U.S.C. § 1 (Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002) · 29 U.S.C. § 206 (Equal Pay Act of 1963) · 37 U.S.C. § 101 (Armed Forces Enlisted Personnel Bonus Revision Act of 1974) · 37 U.S.C. § 401 · 37 U.S.C. § 403
Relies on Stanley v. Illinois · Dandridge v. Williams · Reynolds v. Sims · McGowan v. State of Maryland Gallagher · Shapiro v. Thompson
Cited together with Reed v. Reed · Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld · Craig v. Boren · San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez · Schlesinger v. Ballard
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 2,755 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“an immutable characteristic determined solely by the accident of birth,”
90 later decisions quote this exact passage“unless it is `patently arbitrary' and bears no rational relationship to a legitimate governmental interest.”
13 later decisions quote this exact passage“[t]o give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other, merely to accomplish the elimination of hearings on the merits, is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.