Chambers v. Marsh’s Empirical Analysis
675 F.2d 228 · 1982
Citation profile
9 federal appellate · 1 district ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 19 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently September 2017
9 federal appellate · 1 district ·
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
Relationships
Relies on Younger v. Harris · Flast v. Cohen · Cantwell v. State of Connecticut · Lemon v. Kurtzman · Rizzo v. Goode
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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Here, no speech activity by any legislator is at issue. Moreover, the deliberative process of the legislature will not be impaired to any degree by judicial resolution of the claim brought by Chambers. The prayer practice, as the district court found, bears no substantive relation to the process of enacting legislation. Nor is the independence of any individual legislator threatened by this action. See United States v. Brewster, 408 U.S. 501 , 92 S.Ct. 2531 , 33 L.Ed.2d 507 (1972). Individual prayer by legislators is not at issue. We hold that legislative immunity does not bar an otherwise proper First Amendment challenge to the formal, established practice of the Nebraska legislature by which it compensates a chaplain to open each session with prayer.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“official seal of approval on one religious view”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Marsh v. Chambers
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.