Hicks Ex Rel. Feiock v. Feiock’s Empirical Analysis
1988
Citation profile
380 federal appellate · 64 district · 557 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,441 later decisions (18 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2025 · most notably United States v. Halper (1989), International Union, United Mine Workers v. Bagwell (1994)
380 federal appellate · 64 district · 557 state decisions — followed in 44 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 In the Matter of Samuel Winship · Gault · Sandstrom v. Montana · United States v. United Mine Workers of America · Mullaney v. Wilbur
Cited together with International Union, United Mine Workers v. Bagwell · United States v. United Mine Workers of America · Shillitani v. United States · Bloom v. Illinois · Penfield Co of California v. Securities & Exchange Commission
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 1,441 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“If it is for civil contempt the punishment is remedial, and for the benefit of the complainant. But if it is for criminal contempt the sentence is punitive, to vindicate the authority of the court.”
91 later decisions quote this exact passage“conclusions about the civil or criminal nature of a contempt sanction are properly drawn, not from 'the subjective intent of a State's laws and its courts,' but 'from an examination of the character of the relief itself.'”
14 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[F]ederal courts, under the doctrine of Erie ... must follow the decisions of intermediate state courts in the absence of convincing evidence that the highest court of the state would decide differently.”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Heeney · United States v. Little
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.