Mueller v. Allen’s Empirical Analysis
1983
Citation profile
238 federal appellate · 63 district · 106 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 739 later decisions (66 by the Supreme Court) — most recently November 2023 · most notably Agostini v. Felton Chancellor Board of Education of the City of New York (1997), Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of University of Virginia (1995)
238 federal appellate · 63 district · 106 state decisions — followed in 22 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
reviewedMueller v. Allen (from Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Lemon v. Kurtzman · Everson v. Board of Education · California State Board of Equalization v. Western Marina Corp. · Walz v. Tax Comm'n of City of New York · Widmar v. Vincent
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 739 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“only as a result of numerous private choices of individual parents of school-age children,”
22 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“reluctant to attribute unconstitutional motives to the state, particularly where a plausible [constitutional] purpose may be discovered from the face of the statute.”
18 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“can only dimly perceive the lines of demarcation in this extraordinarily sensitive area of constitutional law,”
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.