Davis v. Alaska’s Empirical Analysis
1974
Citation profile
2,400 federal appellate · 212 district · 6,521 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 10,500 later decisions (62 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2025 · most notably Wolff v. McDonnell (1974), United States v. Bagley (1985)
2,400 federal appellate · 212 district · 6,521 state decisions — followed in 50 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 Gault · Pointer v. Texas · Douglas v. Alabama · Greene v. McElroy
Cited together with Delaware v. Van Arsdall · Chapman v. State of California · Alford v. United States · Chambers v. Mississippi · Pointer v. Texas
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 10,500 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”
616 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“the Court neither holds nor suggests that the Constitution confers a right in every case to impeach the general credibility of a witness through cross-examination about his past delinquency adjudications or criminal convictions.”
27 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“have made a hasty and faulty identification of petitioner to shift suspicion away from himself as one who [actually committed the crime, and the witness] might have been subject to undue pressure from the police and made his identifications under fear of possible probation revocation.”
21 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.