Woodruff v. Parham’s Empirical Analysis
75 U.S. 123 · 1868
Citation profile
16 federal appellate · 22 district · 65 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 313 later decisions (90 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2023 · most notably Munn v. Illinois (1876), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. State of West Virginia State of Ohio (1923)
16 federal appellate · 22 district · 65 state decisions — followed in 28 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.
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 313 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing its Inspection Laws . . . .””
6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“such a tax was a regulation of commerce, a tax imposed upon the • transportation of goods from one State to another, over the high seas, in conflict with that freedom of transit of goods and persons between one State and another, which is within the rule laid down in Crandall v. Nevada, and with the authority of Congress to regulate commerce among the States.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““In the case of Brown v. Maryland, the word imports, as used in the clause now under consideration, is defined, both on the authority of the lexicons and of usage, to be articles brought into the country; and impost is there said to be a duty, custom, or tax levied on articles brought into the country. In the ordinary use of these terms at this day, no one would, for a moment, think of them as having relation to any other articles than those brought from a country foreign to the United States, and at the time the case of Brown v. Maryland was decided — namely, in 1827 — it is reasonable to suppose that the general usage was the same, and that in defining imports as articles brought into the country, the Chief Justice used the word country as a synonyme for United States.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.