Rose v. Locke’s Empirical Analysis
1975
Citation profile
172 federal appellate · 42 district · 577 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 961 later decisions (8 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2025 · most notably Marks v. United States (1977), Whalen v. United States (1980)
172 federal appellate · 42 district · 577 state decisions — followed in 37 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
reviewedHarold Locke v. Jimmy H. Rose, Warden (from Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on United States v. Harriss · Bouie v. City of Columbia · Smith v. Goguen · Hicks v. Miranda · Gooding v. Wilson
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 961 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“criminally responsible for conduct which he could not reasonably understand to be proscribed.”
49 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Respondent argued that the vice in the Tennessee statute derives from the fact that jurisdictions differ as to whether “crime against nature” is to be narrowly applied to only those acts constituting the common-law offense of sodomy, or is to be broadly interpreted to encompass additional forms of sexual aberration. We do not understand him to contend that the broad interpretation is itself impermissibly vague; nor do we think he could successfully do so. We have twice before upheld statutes against similar challenges. In State v. Crawford, 478 S.W.2d 314 (1972), the Supreme Court of Missouri rejected a claim that its crime-against-nature statute was so devoid of definition as to be unconstitutional, pointing out that its provision was derived from early English law and broadly embraced sodomy, bestiality, buggery, fellatio, and cunnilingus within its terms. We dismissed the appeal from this judgment as failing to present a substantial federal question. Crawford v. Missouri, 409 U.S. 811 , 93 S.Ct. 176 , 34 L.Ed.2d 66 (1972); see Hicks v. Miranda, 422 U.S. 332, 343-345 , 95 S.Ct. 2281 , 45 L.Ed.2d 223 (1975). And in Wainwright v. Stone, [ 414 U.S. 21 , 94 S.Ct. 190 , 38 L.Ed.2d 179 (1973)] we held that a Florida statute proscribing “the abominable and detestable crime against nature” was not unconstitutionally vague, despite the fact that the State Supreme Court had recently changed its mind about the statute’s permissible scope. [423 U.S. at 50-51, 96 S.Ct. at 244.]”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“For the purpose of determining whether a state statute is too vague and indefinite to constitute valid legislation “we must take the statute as though it read precisely as the highest court of the State has interpreted it.” ____ When a state statute has been construed to forbid identifiable conduct so that “interpretation by [the state court] puts these words in the statute as definitely as if it had been so amended by the legislature,” claims of impermissible vagueness must be judged in that light.”
1 later decision 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.