O'Brien v. Skinner’s Empirical Analysis
1974
Citation profile
68 federal appellate · 24 district · 35 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 273 later decisions (37 by the Supreme Court) — most recently September 2021 · most notably Bell v. Wolfish (1979), Missouri v. Hunter (1983)
68 federal appellate · 24 district · 35 state decisions — followed in 12 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 Williamson v. Lee Optical of Oklahoma, Inc. · Dunn v. Blumstein · Kramer v. Union Free School District No. 15 · McDonald v. Board of Election Comm'rs of Chicago · Cipriano v. City of Houma
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 273 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[I]t is not our function to construe a state statute contrary to the construction given it by the highest court of a State.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““More recently in Goosby v. Osser, 409 U.S. 512 (1973), the Court again considered the problem of inmate voting and concluded that, unlike the voting restrictions in the McDonald case, the statute there in question was an absolute bar to voting because of a specific provision that ‘persons confined in a penal institution’ were not permitted to vote by absentee ballot. It is clear, therefore, that the appellants here, like the petitioners in Goosby, bring themselves within the precise fact structure that the McDonald holding foreshadowed”: 414 U.S. at 529, 530 .”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“sitting side by side in the same cell may receive different treatment as to voting rights”
1 later decision 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.