Democratic Party of United States v. Wisconsin Ex Rel. La Follette’s Empirical Analysis
1981
Citation profile
170 federal appellate · 66 district · 77 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 529 later decisions (33 by the Supreme Court) — most recently September 2025 · most notably Roberts v. United States Jaycees (1984), Anderson v. Celebrezze (1983)
170 federal appellate · 66 district · 77 state decisions — followed in 17 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
Applies 28 U.S.C. § 1257
Relies on National Association for Advancement of Colored People v. Y Button · National Association for Advancement of Colored People v. State of Alabama Patterson · Branti v. Finkel · Dunn v. Blumstein · United States v. Classic
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 529 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“necessarily presupposes the freedom to identify the people who constitute the association, and to limit the association to those people only.”
16 later decisions quote this exact passage“[A] court[ ] may not constitutionally substitute its own judgment for that of the Party. A political party's choice among the various ways of determining the makeup of a State's delegation to the party's national convention is protected by the Constitution.”
10 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[a]ny interference with the freedom of a party is simultaneously an interference with the freedom of its adherents.”
5 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.