Soules’s Empirical Analysis
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 2 district · 6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 26 later decisions — most recently August 2024 · most notably St. Thomas-St. John Board of Elections v. Daniel (2007), Moore v. Keegan Management Co. (1996)
3 federal appellate · 2 district · 6 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.
Relationships
Relies on Valley Forge Christian College v. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Inc. · City of Los Angeles v. Lyons · Reynolds v. Sims · Duke Power Co. v. Carolina Environmental Study Group, Inc. · Gladstone, Realtors v. Village of Bellwood
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 26 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[F]ailure to require pre-election adjudication would 'permit, if not encourage, parties who could raise a claim to lay by and gamble upon receiving a favorable decision of the electorate and then, upon losing, seek to undo the ballot results in a court action.'”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“We conclude that federal courts are not available for awards of damages to defeated candidates. * * * Our constitution does not contemplate that the federal judiciary routinely will pass judgment on particular elections for federal, state or local office. The conduct of elections is instead a matter committed primarily to the control of states, and legislative bodies are traditionally the final judges in their own membership. The legitimacy of democratic politics would be compromised if the results of elections were regularly to be rehashed in federal courts. Federal courts, of course, have actively guarded the electoral process from class-based discrimination and restrictive state elections laws. This suit, however, asks us to consider the award of damages for election irregularities that neither disenfranchised a class of voters nor impugned state and federal procedures for the proper conduct of elections____ [W]e refuse to authorize yet another avenue for those disgruntled with the political process to keep the contest alive in the courtroom.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“To permit a Section 1983 damage action under these circumstances ... would open the door for “sore losers” to rehash virtually every election campaign in the federal courts long after the election process should have given way to the process of governance. Such a ruling would provide a perverse incentive for every “losing candidate to ignore the principal routes established to challenge an election and to proceed instead to have the election reviewed in federal court in hopes of gaining monetary compensation.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.