Rhines v. Weber’s Empirical Analysis
2005
Citation profile
415 federal appellate · 173 district · 24 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,414 later decisions (29 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2026 · most notably Jones v. Bock (2007), Mayle v. Felix (2005)
415 federal appellate · 173 district · 24 state decisions
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
reviewedRhines v. Weber (from Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Applies 28 U.S.C. § 2244 (Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996) · 28 U.S.C. § 2254 (Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996)
Relies on Slack v. McDaniel · Rose v. Lundy · Landis v. North American Co. · Darr v. Burford · George Duncan Superintendent Great Meadow Correctional Facility v. Sherman Walker
Cited together with Rose v. Lundy · Strickland v. Washington · Coleman v. Thompson · Williams v. Taylor · Slack v. McDaniel
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 1,414 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[S]tay and abeyance should be available only in limited circumstances. Because granting a stay effectively excuses a petitioner’s failure to present his claims first to the state courts, stay and abeyance is only appropriate when the district court determines there was good cause for the petitioner’s failure to exhaust his claims first in state court. Moreover, even if a petitioner had good cause for that failure, the district court would abuse its discretion if it were to grant him a stay when his unexhausted claims are plainly meritless.”
59 later decisions quote this exact passage“if a petitioner presents a district court with a mixed petition and the court determines that a stay and abeyance [to allow time for exhaustion in state court] is inappropriate, the court should allow the petitioner to delete the unexhausted claims and to proceed with the exhausted claims if dismissal of the entire petition would unreasonably impair the petitioner's right to obtain relief.”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“An incarcerated person, mindful of the one-year statute of limitations imposed by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2244 (d), apparently may file a timely petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2254 addressing claims that have been exhausted before the relevant state courts and then obtain a stay of the federal proceeding pending the outcome of a second post-conviction proceeding before the state courts, in those states which allow successive petitions for post-conviction relief.”
2 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.