Virginia v. West Virginia’s Empirical Analysis
78 U.S. 39 · 1870
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 1 district · 10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 51 later decisions (5 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 1996 · most notably Massachusetts v. Mellon (1923), Gerling v. Baltimore Ohio R Co (1894)
4 federal appellate · 1 district · 10 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.
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.
““(3) The ordinance of the organic convention of the commonwealth of Virginia, under which the state of West Virginia was organized, and the act of May 13, 1862, of the said commonwealth, constitute a proposition of the former state that the counties of Jefferson and Berkeley and others might, on certain conditions, become part of the new state; and the provisions of the Constitution of the new state concerning those counties are an acceptance of that proposition. “(4) The act of Congress admitting the state of West Virginia into the Union at the request of the commonwealth of Virginia, with the provisions for the transfer of these counties in the Constitution of the new state, and in the acts of the Virginia Legislature, is an implied consent to the agreement of those states on that subject. “(5) The consent required by the Constitution to make valid agreements between the states need not necessarily be by an express assent to every proposition of the agreement. In the present case the assent is an irresistible inference from the legislation of Congress m: the subject.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Coyle v. Smith“that it has jurisdiction of questions of. boundary between two States of this Union, and that this jurisdiction is not defeated, because in deciding that question it becomes necessary to examine into and construe compacts or agreements between those States, or because the decree which the court may render, affects the territorial limits of the political jurisdiction and sovereignty of the States which are parties to the proceeding.”
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.