United States v. National Treasury Employees Union’s Empirical Analysis
1995
Citation profile
447 federal appellate · 131 district · 109 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,163 later decisions (20 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2025 · most notably United States v. Booker (2004), Scott v. Harris (2007)
447 federal appellate · 131 district · 109 state decisions — followed in 23 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 District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205 Will County Illinois · Perry v. Sindermann · Connick v. Myers · Buckley v. Valeo · Broadrick v. Oklahoma
Cited together with Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205 Will County Illinois · Connick v. Myers · Rankin v. McPherson · Waters v. Churchill · Anderson v. Liberty Lobby, 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 1,163 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“may impose restraints on the job-related speech of public employees that would be plainly unconstitutional if applied to the public at large.”
83 later decisions quote this exact passage“[w]hen the Government defends a regulation on speech as a means to redress past harms or prevent anticipated harms, it ... must demonstrate that the recited harms are real, not merely conjectural, and that the regulation will in fact alleviate these harms in a direct and material way.”
23 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“), viz., "that the interests of both potential audiences and a vast group of present and future employees in a broad range of present and future expression are outweighed by that expression's `necessary impact on the actual operation of the Government.'”
19 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Crue v. Aiken · Koontz v. Watson
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.