Bennett v. Spear’s Empirical Analysis
1997
Citation profile
1,915 federal appellate · 1,411 district · 100 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 6,407 later decisions (73 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2026 · most notably Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Environment (1998), Whitman Administrator of Environmental Protection Agency v. American Trucking Associations Inc (2001)
1,915 federal appellate · 1,411 district · 100 state decisions — followed in 20 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 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife · Warth v. Seldin · Valley Forge Christian College v. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Inc. · Allen v. Wright · Association of Data Processing Service Organizations, Inc. v. Camp
Cited together with Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife · Warth v. Seldin · Allen v. Wright · Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Environment · Abbott Laboratories v. Gardner
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 6,407 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“rights or obligations have been determined,”
200 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“(1) that the plaintiff have suffered an “injury in fact” — an invasion of a judicially cognizable interest which is (a) concrete and particularized and (b) actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical; (2) that there be a causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of — the injury must be fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant, and not the result of the independent action of some third party not before the court; and (3) that it be likely, as opposed to merely speculative, that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision.”
110 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“mark[s] the consummation of the agency's decisionmaking process”
47 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.