Bifulco v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
1,150 federal appellate · 76 district · 164 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,754 later decisions (34 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2024 · most notably Taylor v. United States (1990), Albernaz v. United States (1981)
1,150 federal appellate · 76 district · 164 state decisions — followed in 23 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
reviewedBifulco v. United States (from Second Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill · Whalen v. United States · Iannelli v. United States · United States v. Batchelder · United States v. Timmreck
Cited together with United States v. Bass · Ladner v. United States · Moskal v. United States · Albernaz v. United States · Blockburger v. United States
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 1,754 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“means that the Court will not interpret a federal criminal statute so as to increase the penalty that it places on an individual when such an interpretation can be based on no more than a guess as to what Congress intended.”
21 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“those situations in which a reasonable doubt persists about a statute's intended scope even after resort to 'the language and structure, legislative history, and motivating policies' of the statute.”
13 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“'[T]he touchstone of the rule of lenity is statutory ambiguity.’ ” (quoting Bifulco v. United States, 447 U.S. 381 , 387, 100 S.Ct. 2247 , 65 L.Ed.2d 205 (1980))); United States v. Salazar, 542 F.3d 139 , 147 (5th Cir.2008) (requiring”
10 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.