Bigelow v. Virginia’s Empirical Analysis
1975
Citation profile
317 federal appellate · 123 district · 450 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,446 later decisions (98 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2025 · most notably Warth v. Seldin (1975), Buckley v. Valeo (1976)
317 federal appellate · 123 district · 450 state decisions — followed in 33 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 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan · Baker v. Carr · Roe v. Wade · Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. · Broadrick v. Oklahoma
Cited together with Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, Inc. · Central Hudson Gas Electric Corporation v. Public Service Commission of New York · Bates v. State Bar of Arizona · Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations · Broadrick v. Oklahoma
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 1,446 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“a court may not escape the task of assessing the First Amendment interest at stake and weighing it against the public interest allegedly served by the regulation.”
38 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“because of the 'danger of tolerating, in the area of First Amendment freedoms, the existence of a penal statute susceptible of sweeping an improper application.'”
18 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent““In view of the statute’s amendment since Bigelow’s conviction in such a way as ‘effectively to repeal’ its prior application, there is , no possibility now that the statute’s pre-1972 form will be applied again to appellant or will chill the rights of others. As a practical matter, the issue of its overbreadth has become moot for the future. We therefore decline to rest our decision on overbreadth and we pass on to the further inquiry, of greater moment not only for Bigelow but for others,, whether the statute, as applied to appellant infringed constitutionally protected speech.” Bigelow v. Virginia (1975), 421 U.S. 809,817-18 , 44 L. Ed. 2d 600,609 ,95 S. Ct. ' 2222,2230: • .”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.