Burke v. Barnes’s Empirical Analysis
1987
Citation profile
165 federal appellate · 22 district · 14 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 410 later decisions (19 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2025 · most notably United States v. Salerno (1987), Arizonans for Official English v. Arizona (1997)
165 federal appellate · 22 district · 14 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
reviewedthe decision below (from District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Applies 1 U.S.C. § 106A · 31 U.S.C. § 1341
Relies on United States v. Munsingwear, Inc. · Sosna v. Iowa · Golden v. Zwickler · Hall v. Beals · Diffenderfer v. Central Baptist Church of Miami, Florida, Inc.
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 410 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Article III of the Constitution requires that there be a live case or controversy at the time that a federal court decides the case; it is not enough that there may have been a live case or controversy when the case was decided by the court whose judgment we are reviewing.”
11 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“afford[s] no basis for our passing on the substantive issues.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“by its own terms [becomes] a dead letter,”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Catanzano v. Wing
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.