Sloan v. Lemon’s Empirical Analysis
1973
Citation profile
61 federal appellate · 21 district · 51 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 251 later decisions (38 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2018 · most notably United States v. Booker (2004), Carey v. Population Services International (1977)
61 federal appellate · 21 district · 51 state decisions — followed in 13 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 Lemon v. Kurtzman · Everson v. Board of Education · Walz v. Tax Comm'n of City of New York · Committee for Public Education & Religious Liberty v. Nyquist · Lemon v. Kurtzman
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 251 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“as an incentive to parents to send their children to sectarian schools, or as a reward for having done so.... to preserve and support religion-oriented institutions.”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“would be to create a program quite different from the one the legislature actually adopted”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.””
3 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.