Saudi Arabia v. Nelson’s Empirical Analysis
1993
Citation profile
401 federal appellate · 299 district · 6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,279 later decisions (14 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 2025 · most notably Mwani v. Bin Laden (2005), Price v. Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (2002)
401 federal appellate · 299 district · 6 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
reviewedNelson v. Arabia (from Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Adickes v. S. H. Kress & Co. · Wilson v. Garcia · Montana v. United States · Feres v. United States · United States v. Gaubert
Cited together with Republic of Argentina v. Weltover, Inc. · Argentine Republic v. Amerada Hess Shipping Corp. · Verlinden B. v. v. Central Bank of Nigeria · First National City Bank v. Banco Para El Comercio Exterior De Cuba · Republic of Austria v. Altmann
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 1,279 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Congress manifestly understood there to be a difference between a suit “based upon” commercial activity and one “based upon” acts performed “in connection with” such activity. The only reasonable reading of the former term calls for something more than a mere connection with, or relation to, commercial activity.”
57 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“everyday burdens of the marketplace onto the shoulders of private parties.”
43 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[B]ecause the Act provides that the commercial character of an act is to be determined by reference to its “nature” rather than its “purpose,” the question is not whether the foreign government is acting with a profit motive or instead with the aim of fulfilling uniquely sovereign objectives. Rather, the issue is whether the particular actions that the foreign state performs (whatever the motive behind them) are the type of actions by which a private party engages in “trade and traffic or commerce.””
21 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.