Miller v. Cunningham’s Empirical Analysis
512 F.3d 98 · 2007
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 6 later decisions — most recently March 2025
1 federal appellate · 1 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.
Relationships
Relies on Baker v. Carr · Reynolds v. Sims · Powell v. McCormack · Williams v. Rhodes · United States v. Carolene Products 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 6 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[TJhere is certainly nothing unconstitutional per se about incumbents shaping the electoral process to their advantage. This is merely a feature of American politics. The Framers were surely aware of the desire of those who hold elective office to retain elective office, yet they were clearly comfortable giving incumbents the authority to write election law. Judicial intervention into the electoral process, merely for the purpose of rooting out self-interested political behavior, would therefore be a[ ] “substantial” incursion into textually and traditionally legislative prerogatives.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent“Allowing the incumbent to bind a party despite these differences-without the party's explicit or implicit consent-is the very definition of an unconstitutional burden on the party's associative rights, and a sufficient reason, in and of itself, to declare Va. Code Ann. § 24.2-509 (B) unconstitutional.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Fitzgerald v. Alcorn“incumbent will focus primarily on his or her chances for re-election, while the party may have multi-faceted goals that are not necessarily best achieved by maximizing a particular individual's re-electability.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Fitzgerald v. Alcorn
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.