Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar’s Empirical Analysis
1975
Citation profile
720 federal appellate · 235 district · 466 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 2,335 later decisions (112 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2026 · most notably District of Columbia Court of Appeals v. Feldman (1983), Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida (1996)
720 federal appellate · 235 district · 466 state decisions — followed in 45 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedLewis H. Goldfarb and Ruth S. Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar and Fairfax County Bar Association, Lewis H. Goldfarb and Ruth S. Goldfarb v. Fairfax County Bar Association (from Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Edelman v. Jordan · United States v. Socony-Vacuum Oil Co. · Parker v. Brown · Gibson v. Berryhill · United States v. Philadelphia National Bank
Cited together with Parker v. Brown · Bates v. State Bar of Arizona · Cantor v. Detroit Edison Co. · City of Lafayette Louisiana v. Louisiana Power & Light Company · California Retail Liquor Dealers Assn. v. Midcal Aluminum, Inc.
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 2,335 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The interest of the States in regulating lawyers is especially great since lawyers are essential to the primary governmental function of administering justice, and have historically been 'officers of the courts.'”
56 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“It is not enough that . . . anticompetitive conduct is 'prompted' by state action; rather, anticompetitive activities must be compelled by direction of the State acting as a sovereign.”
39 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“Given the substantial volume of commerce involved, and the inseparability of this particular legal service from the interstate aspects of real estate transactions, we conclude that interstate commerce has been sufficiently affected.”
35 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.