Hutto v. Davis’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
453 federal appellate · 71 district · 241 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,201 later decisions (31 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2026 · most notably Solem v. Helm (1983), Harmelin v. Michigan (1991)
453 federal appellate · 71 district · 241 state decisions — followed in 29 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
reviewedDavis v. Davis (from Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Ingraham v. Wright · Robinson v. State of California · Trop v. Dulles · Rummel v. Estelle · Weems v. United States
Cited together with Rummel v. Estelle · Solem v. Helm · Harmelin v. Michigan · Ewing v. California · Lockyer Attorney General of California v. Andrade
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 1,201 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“But unless we wish anarchy to prevail within the federal judicial system, a precedent of this Court must be followed by the lower federal courts no matter how misguided the judges of those courts may think it to be.”
20 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“successful challenges to the proportionality of particular sentences should be exceedingly rare.”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[T]he excessiveness of one prison term as compared to another is invariably a subjective determination, there being no clear way to make 'any constitutional distinction between one term of years and a shorter or longer term of years.'”
4 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.