Goguen v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
471 F.2d 88 · 1972
Citation profile
20 federal appellate · 6 district · 8 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 42 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2014 · most notably Smith v. Goguen (1974), Kenneth R. Mancuso v. James L. Taft, Mayor (1973)
20 federal appellate · 6 district · 8 state decisions
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
Relationships
Relies on Younger v. Harris · New York Times Co. v. Sullivan · Grayned v. City of Rockford · Flast v. Cohen · United States v. O'Brien
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 42 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““We realize that fine distinctions may be drawn between what constitutes the content of, as opposed to the method used in, symbolic speech. Yet in the nebulous realm of symbolic speech there is truth in the statement that ‘the medium is the message’ and to suppress the medium is to censor the message.” (Citations omitted.)”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“In the context of a federal habeas corpus proceeding a state criminal statute should not be ruled unconstitutional on its face as overbroad unless (1) the area affected by it includes a large proportion of First Amendment activities, (2) it possesses the potential for a substantial number of impermissible applications, and (3) immediate and effective excision of the statute’s impermissible applications is not foreseeable without continued interruptions of First Amendment freedoms. Goguen v. Smith, supra, 471 F.2d at 98 .”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“The present case cannot be compared to the situation where a person who sees thousands of others illegally crossing a street seeks to escape punishment for commission of a similar wrong. In that situation there are well-defined crossing signals, cross-walks and signs which give all persons adequate notice that they are about to commit an offense. Instead we have the totally different situation where those charged with violation of the [flag] statute ... after having seen unpunished hundreds, perhaps thousands, of citizens with American flags sewn to various parts of their clothes, or flying in frayed condition from radio antennas of automobiles, or used as advertising in store windows, are expected to know that their similar actions — such as sewing a flag to the seat of one’s pants— could constitute contemptuous treatment.”
1 later decision 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.