Slaughter-House Cases the Butchers' Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. The Crescent City Live’s Empirical Analysis
83 U.S. 36 · 1872
Citation profile
276 federal appellate · 115 district · 441 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,552 later decisions (272 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2026 · most notably Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), Baker v. Carr (1962)
276 federal appellate · 115 district · 441 state decisions — followed in 44 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
Cited together with United States v. Cruikshank · Civil Rights Cases · Albert Twining v. State of New Jersey · Screws v. United States · United States v. Harris
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 1,552 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“which owe their existence to the Federal government, its National character, its Constitution, or its laws.”
71 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
37 later decisions quote this exact passage““A few years experience satisfied the thoughtful men who had been the authors of the other two Amendments that, notwithstanding the restraints of those articles on the states, and the laws passed under the additional powers granted to Congress, these were inadequate for the protection of life, liberty and property, without which freedom to the slave was no boon. They were in all those states denied the right of suffrage. The laws were administered by the white man alone. It was urged that a race of men distinctively marked as was the negro, living in the midst of another and dominant race, could never be fully secured in their person and their property without the right of suffrage. “Hence the 15th Amendment, which declares that ‘the right of a citizen of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by any state on account of race, color, or previous' condition of servitude.’ The negro having, by the 14th Amendment, been declared to be a citizen of the United States, is thus made a voter in every state of the Union. “We repeat, then, in the light of this recapitulation of events, almost too recent to be called history, but which are familiar to us all; and on the most casual examination of the language of these amendments, no one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in them all, lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have been even suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm estab”
17 later decisions 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.