Babbitt v. United Farm Workers National Union’s Empirical Analysis
1979
Citation profile
1,186 federal appellate · 604 district · 166 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 3,726 later decisions (51 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2025 · most notably Blum v. Yaretsky (1982), Whitmore v. Arkansas (1990)
1,186 federal appellate · 604 district · 166 state decisions — followed in 27 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 · Colorado River Water Conservation District v. United States · Buckley v. Valeo · Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc.
Cited together with Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife · Steffel v. Thompson · Warth v. Seldin · Younger v. Harris · Abbott Laboratories v. Gardner
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 3,726 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“should not be required to await and undergo a criminal prosecution as the sole means of seeking relief.”
223 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“fear of criminal prosecution under an allegedly unconstitutional statute is not imaginary or wholly speculative,”
21 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“paradigm of the 'special circumstances' " that must exist before invoking Pullman's narrow exception to the exercise of federal jurisdiction is "a case where the challenged statute is susceptible of a construction by the state judiciary that would avoid or modify the necessity of reaching a constitutional question.”
15 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.