Meloon v. Helgemoe’s Empirical Analysis
564 F.2d 602 · 1977
Citation profile
15 federal appellate · 3 district · 26 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 51 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 2000 · most notably United States Railroad Retirement Board v. Fritz (1980), Michael M. v. Superior Court of Sonoma County (1981)
15 federal appellate · 3 district · 26 state decisions — followed in 15 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 Williamson v. Lee Optical of Oklahoma, Inc. · Craig v. Boren · Reed v. Reed · Skinner v. State of Oklahoma Williamson · Lindsley v. Natural Carbonic Gas 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 51 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“We want to take care to indicate the limited nature of our holding. We have found only one particular statutory rape law to be unconstitutional. We have not reflected on nor do we intend to question the constitutionality of the laws of other states. We express no opinion as to whether on a different record some other statute would pass constitutional scrutiny.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage““We examine the pregnancy prevention rationale with special wariness. Certainly the fact that women and not men bear children is a fundamental distinguishing characteristic of the two sexes and as such it can be the basis for some gender based legislation; but there is a danger that the very uniqueness of this characteristic makes it an available hindsight catchall rationalization for laws that were promulgated with totally different purposes in mind. New Hampshire presents us with not an iota of testimony or evidence that the prevention of pregnancy was a purpose of its statutory rape law. Indeed, all the inferences that may be drawn from the materials presented to us are to the contrary.” [Footnote omitted.]”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“between (1) the fact that one subclass of one gender class of victims has some indeterminate likelihood of suffering an additional injury to which the other gender class is not susceptible and (2) the state’s statutory scheme which penalizes only one gender exclusively and protects the other gender exclusively.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Rundlett v. Oliver
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.