Brown v. Thomson’s Empirical Analysis
1983
Citation profile
67 federal appellate · 53 district · 124 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 508 later decisions (23 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2022 · most notably Voinovich v. Quilter (1993), League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry (2006)
67 federal appellate · 53 district · 124 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.
Relationships
Relies on Baker v. Carr · Reynolds v. Sims · California State Board of Equalization v. Western Marina Corp. · White v. Regester · Whitcomb v. Chavis
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 508 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[M]inor deviations from mathematical equality among state legislative districts are insufficient to make out a prima facie case of invidious discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment so as to require justification by the State. Our decisions have established, as a general matter, that an apportionment plan with a maximum population deviation under 10% falls within this category of minor deviations. A plan with larger disparities in population, however, creates a prima facie case of discrimination and therefore must be justified by the State.”
20 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““Our cases since Reynolds have clarified the structure of constitutional inquiry into state legislative apportionments, setting up what amounts to a four-step test. First, a plaintiff must show that the deviations at issue are sufficiently large to make out a prima facie case of discrimination. We have come to establish a rough threshold of 10% maximum deviation from equality (adding together the deviations from average district size of the most underrepresented and most overrepresented districts); below that level, deviations will ordinarily be considered de minimis. ””
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[t]he showing required to justify population deviations is flexible, depending on the size of the deviations, the importance of the State's interests, the consistency with which the plan as a whole reflects those interests, and the availability of alternatives that might substantially vindicate those interests yet approximate population equality more closely.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.