Abrams v. Johnson’s Empirical Analysis
1997
Citation profile
119 federal appellate · 47 district · 47 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 458 later decisions (9 by the Supreme Court) — most recently May 2025 · most notably District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry (2006)
119 federal appellate · 47 district · 47 state decisions — followed in 13 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.
Relationships
Relies on Reynolds v. Sims · United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co. · Thornburg v. Gingles · Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena · City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson 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 458 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“consider[ ] whether, on the totality of the circumstances, minorities have been denied an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Court-ordered districts are held to higher standards of population equality than legislative ones. A court-ordered plan should ‘ordinarily achieve the goal of population equality with little more than de minimis variation.'”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[b]lack and black-preferred candidates in Georgia ha[d] achieved many electoral victories in local and statewide elections and ha[d] received significant-occasionally overwhelming-support from both black and white voters within the [applicable] district.”
2 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.