Trainor v. Hernandez’s Empirical Analysis
1977
Citation profile
499 federal appellate · 200 district · 14 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,444 later decisions (61 by the Supreme Court) — most recently May 2025 · most notably Montana v. United States (1979), Patsy v. Board of Regents of Fla. (1982)
499 federal appellate · 200 district · 14 state decisions
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 · Fuentes v. Shevin · Gerstein v. Pugh · Burford v. Sun Oil Co. · Steffel v. Thompson
Cited together with Younger v. Harris · Huffman v. Pursue, Ltd. · Juidice v. Vail · Moore v. Sims · Middlesex County Ethics Committee v. Garden State Bar Ass'n
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 1,444 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“administering its public-assistance programs”
13 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“is more akin to a criminal prosecution than are most civil cases. The State is a party to the Court of Common Pleas proceeding, and the proceeding is both in aid of and closely related to criminal statutes which prohibit the dissemination of obscene materials. Thus, an offense to the State’s interest in the nuisance litigation is likely to be every bit as great as it would be were this a criminal proceeding.”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“flagrantly and patently violative of express constitutional prohibitions in every clause, sentence and paragraph, and in whatever manner and against whomever an effort might be made to apply it.”
9 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.