Wooley v. Maynard’s Empirical Analysis
1977
Citation profile
872 federal appellate · 302 district · 180 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 2,334 later decisions (106 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2026 · most notably Murray v. Carrier (1986), Employment Division Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. L Smith (1990)
872 federal appellate · 302 district · 180 state decisions — followed in 26 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 Younger v. Harris · New York Times Co. v. Sullivan · United States v. O'Brien · Steffel v. Thompson · West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette
Cited together with West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette · Younger v. Harris · Abood v. Detroit Board of Education · Riley v. National Federation of Blind of North Carolina, Inc. · Huffman v. Pursue, Ltd.
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 2,334 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]he right of freedom of thought protected by the First Amendment against state action includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all.”
83 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“only to be free from prosecutions for future violations of the same statutes.”
18 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[W]here the State's interest is to disseminate an ideology, no matter how acceptable to some, such interest cannot outweigh an individual's First Amendment right to avoid becoming the courier for such message.”
9 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.