Clinton v. Jones’s Empirical Analysis
1997
Citation profile
262 federal appellate · 198 district · 93 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,093 later decisions (37 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2026 · most notably Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (2007), Cheney v. United States District Court for District of Columbia (2004)
262 federal appellate · 198 district · 93 state decisions — followed in 18 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 Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics · Mitchell v. Forsyth · Baker v. Carr · Buckley v. Valeo
Cited together with Landis v. North American Co. · United States v. Nixon · Nixon v. Fitzgerald · Swint v. Chambers County Commission · Mistretta v. United States
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 1,093 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The District Court has broad discretion to stay proceedings as an incident to its power to control its own docket.”
55 later decisions quote this exact passage“If there is one doctrine more deeply rooted than any other in the process of constitutional adjudication, it is that we ought not to pass on questions of constitutionality ... unless such adjudication is unavoidable.”
14 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“decide any constitutional question in advance of the necessity for its decision[,] * * * formulate a rule of constitutional law broader than is required by the precise facts to which it is to be applied[,] * * * [or] decide any constitutional question except with reference to the particular facts to which it is to be applied[.]”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Qassim v. Trump · Pena v. State
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.