Collins v. Youngblood’s Empirical Analysis
1990
Citation profile
678 federal appellate · 242 district · 1,528 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 3,144 later decisions (47 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2026 · most notably Landgraf v. USI Film Products (1994), Lindh v. Murphy (1997)
678 federal appellate · 242 district · 1,528 state decisions — followed in 47 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedthe decision below (from Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Teague v. Lane · Duncan v. State of Louisiana · Patsy v. Board of Regents of Fla. · Dobbert v. Florida
Cited together with Weaver v. Graham · Beazell v. State of Ohio Chatfield · California Department of Corrections v. Morales · Miller v. Florida · Dobbert v. Florida
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 3,144 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“retroactively alter the definition of crimes or increase the punishment for criminal acts.”
189 later decisions quote this exact passage“[t]he Beazell formulation is faithful to our best knowledge of the original understanding of the Ex Post Facto Clause: Legislatures may not retroactively alter the definition of crimes or increase the punishment for criminal acts.”
21 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“makes more burdensome the punishment for a crime, after its commission,”
20 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.