Spilled ink vs. Practical Impact

There exist a few dozen cases that nearly every law student (in the US) studies in law school. In fact, there are even some famous ones that non-lawyers, and even non-US-non-lawyers know. Cases like Roe v. Wade (legalizing abortion), Plessy v. Ferguson (legalizing segregation), Brown v. Board of Education (ending segregation), and Dred Scott v. Sandford have crept into the popular zeitgeist.

While scholars and students continue to write about these cases, how important are they when it comes to arguing cases before a judge?

This project is concerned with creating a system to compare how often a case appears in the opinions of the courts rather than the pages of the law journals.