Small v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
2005
Citation profile
129 federal appellate · 25 district · 17 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 317 later decisions (27 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2026 · most notably Lopez v. Gonzales (2006), Ali v. Federal Bureau of Prisons (2008)
129 federal appellate · 25 district · 17 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
reviewedUnited States v. Small (from Third Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Atascadero State Hospital v. Scanlon · Middlesex County Sewerage Authority v. National Sea Clammers Assn. · Flora v. United States · Lewis v. United States · Public Citizen v. United States Department of Justice
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 317 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“legal presumption that Congress ordinarily intends its statutes to have domestic, not extraterritorial, application.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“no convincing indication to the contrary”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“those who use legislative history to help discern congressional intent will see the history here as silent, hence a neutral factor, that simply confirms the obvious, namely, that Congress did not consider the issue.” See Small v. United States, 544 U.S. 385 , 393, 125 S.Ct. 1752 , 161 L.Ed.2d 651 (2005). 4 . As we have previously observed, the direct evidence of CERCLA’s legislative history includes”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.