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← 539 U.S. 306 - Grutter v. Bollinger

Grutter v. Bollinger’s Empirical Analysis

2003

Citation profile

958
cited by 958 later decisions
45
cited 45 times by the Supreme Court
26
states following
June 2026
most recently cited

353 federal appellate · 96 district · 148 state decisions

How this case has been cited

Cited by 958 later decisions (45 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2026 · most notably Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), Ricci v. DeStefano (2009)

353 federal appellate · 96 district · 148 state decisions — followed in 26 states

4900200320102020decided

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

reviewedGrutter v. Bollinger (from Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals)

Relationships

Relies on Miller-El v. Cockrell Director Texas Department of Criminal Justice Institutional Division · Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al. · United States v. Lopez · Marks v. United States · Plyler v. Doe

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 958 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

  1. “In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity.”
    14 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
    e.g. Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin · Schuette v. Coal. to Defend Affirmative Action
  2. “[n]arrow tailoring does not require exhaustion of every conceivable race-neutral alternative,”
    11 later decisions quote this exact passage
    e.g. Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin · Fisher v. University of Tex. at Austin
  3. “classroom discussion is livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and interesting when the students have the greatest possible variety of backgrounds.”
    9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
    e.g. Doe v. Boyertown Area Sch. Dist. · Doe v. Boyertown Area Sch. Dist.

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.