Virginia v. Hicks’s Empirical Analysis
2003
Citation profile
286 federal appellate · 95 district · 250 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,024 later decisions (13 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2025 · most notably Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), United States v. Williams (2008)
286 federal appellate · 95 district · 250 state decisions — followed in 32 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 Warth v. Seldin · Valley Forge Christian College v. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Inc. · Broadrick v. Oklahoma · National Association for Advancement of Colored People v. Y Button · Dombrowski v. Pfister
Cited together with Broadrick v. Oklahoma · Members of the City Council of Los Angeles v. Taxpayers for Vincent · Ward v. Rock Against Racism · New York v. Ferber · Hoffman Estates v. Flipside, Hoffman Estates, 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 1,024 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Because the district court did not address either of these claims, we leave it to the district court in the first instance to consider them — as well as Prime Media’s standing to raise them — keeping in mind that “a law’s application to protected speech [must] be substantial, not only in an absolute sense, but also relative to the scope of the law’s plainly legitimate applications, before applying the strong medicine of overbreadth invalidation.””
20 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“punishes a `substantial' amount of protected free speech, `judged in relation to the statute's plainly legitimate sweep.'”
16 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“from the text of [the law] and from actual fact,”
14 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.