Brandon v. Board of Education’s Empirical Analysis
635 F.2d 971 · 1980
Citation profile
45 federal appellate · 4 district · 3 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 111 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2018 · most notably Board of Ed. of Westside Community Schools (Dist. 66) v. Mergens (1990), Fox v. Board of Trustees of the State University of New York (1994)
45 federal appellate · 4 district · 3 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.
Relationships
Relies on Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District · Cantwell v. State of Connecticut · Lemon v. Kurtzman · Wisconsin v. Yoder · Sherbert v. Verner
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 111 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Our nation’s elementary and secondary schools play a unique role in transmitting basic and fundamental values to our youth. To an impressionable student, even the mere appearance of secular involvement in religious activities might indicate that the state has placed its imprimatur on a particular religious creed. This symbolic inference is too dangerous to permit.”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[W]hen the explicit Establishment Clause proscription against prayer in the public schools is considered, the protections of political and religious speech are inapposite.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence““To demonstrate an infringement of his free exercise rights, an individual must show ‘the coercive effect of the [state] enactment as it operates against him in the practice of his religion.’ School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, * * U.S. [203,] at 223, 83 S.Ct. [1560] at 1572 [ 10 L.Ed.2d 844 (1963)]. The analysis need not involve a court in determining the sincerity of one’s religious beliefs, United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78 , 64 S.Ct. 882 , 88 L.Ed. 1148 (1944), but it does require that the court inquire into the relative importance of a particular religious ritual and the degree to which exercise of that practice is infringed by government action.” Id. at 976.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.