Mansell v. Mansell’s Empirical Analysis
1989
Citation profile
84 federal appellate · 21 district · 792 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,064 later decisions (9 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2026 · most notably Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (2004), Boggs v. Boggs (1997)
84 federal appellate · 21 district · 792 state decisions — followed in 45 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 10 U.S.C. § 1408 · 10 U.S.C. § 3911 · 38 U.S.C. § 310 · 38 U.S.C. § 3101 · 42 U.S.C. § 659 (§ 459 of the Social Security Act of 1935)
Relies on Blum v. Stenson · Consumer Product Safety Commission v. GTE Sylvania, Inc. · McCarty v. McCarty · Midlantic National Bank v. New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection · Hisquierdo v. Hisquierdo
Cited together with McCarty v. McCarty · Hisquierdo v. Hisquierdo · Rose v. Rose · Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. · United States v. Ron Pair Enterprises, 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 1,064 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“We realize that reading the statute literally may inflict economic harm on many former spouses. But we decline to misread the statute in order to reach a sympathetic result when such a reading requires us to do violence to the plain language of the statute and to ignore much of the legislative history. Congress chose the language that requires us to decide as we do, and Congress is free to change it.”
29 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Gross v. Wilson · Hisgen v. Hisgen“Subject to the limitations of this section, a court may treat disposable retired or retainer pay payable to a member for pay periods beginning after June 25, 1981, either as property solely of the member or as property of the member and his spouse in accordance with the law of the jurisdiction of such court.”
25 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“the total monthly retired or retainer pay to which a military member is entitled,”
11 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.