The Daniel Ball’s Empirical Analysis
77 U.S. 557 · 1870
Citation profile
260 federal appellate · 96 district · 192 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 939 later decisions (95 by the Supreme Court) — most recently May 2026 · most notably National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. (1937), Southern Pacific Terminal Company v. Interstate Commerce Commission (1911)
260 federal appellate · 96 district · 192 state decisions — followed in 41 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 Ducat v. Chicago
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 939 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Those rivers must be regarded as public navigable rivers in law which are navigable in fact. And they are navigable in fact when they are used, or are susceptible of being used, in their ordinary condition, as highways for commerce, over which trade and travel are or may be conducted in the customary modes of trade and travel on water.”
132 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Kidd v. Pearson · Packer v. Bird
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.