Palmore v. Sidoti’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
301 federal appellate · 62 district · 226 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 899 later decisions (49 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2026 · most notably City of Cleburne Texas v. Cleburne Living Center (1985), Employment Division Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. L Smith (1990)
301 federal appellate · 62 district · 226 state decisions — followed in 35 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 Shelley v. Kraemer · Personnel Administrator of Mass. v. Feeney · Loving v. Commonwealth of Virginia · McLaughlin v. Florida · Local 408, International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. National Labor Relations Board
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 899 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The Constitution cannot control such prejudices but neither can it tolerate them. Private biases may be outside the reach of the law, but the law cannot, directly or indirectly, give them effect.”
66 later decisions quote this exact passage“[t]he effects of racial prejudice, however real, cannot justify a racial classification removing an infant child from the custody of its natural mother found to be an appropriate person to have such custody.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“interracial disturbances, violence, riots, and community confusion,”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Naragon v. Wharton
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.