South Carolina v. Baker’s Empirical Analysis
1988
Citation profile
174 federal appellate · 29 district · 63 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 491 later decisions (40 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2025 · most notably Payne v. Tennessee (1991), New York v. United States (1992)
174 federal appellate · 29 district · 63 state decisions — followed in 16 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
Applies 26 U.S.C. § 103
Relies on M'Culloch v. State of Maryland · United States v. Carolene Products Co. · National League of Cities v. Usery · Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority · Minnesota v. Clover Leaf Creamery Co.
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 491 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“That a State wishing to engage in certain activity must take administrative and sometimes legislative action to comply with federal standards regulating that activity is a commonplace that presents no constitutional defect.”
33 later decisions quote this exact passage“or on an agency or instrumentality so closely connected to the Government that the two cannot realistically be viewed as separate entities, at least insofar as the activity being taxed is concerned.”
14 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“'in the national political process or that it was singled out in a way that left it politically isolated and powerless.'”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.