Case Citator › Brown v. Ohio

Brown v. Ohio

Is it still good law? What later courts have actually done to this case.

Criticized by some courts
Court
Supreme Court of the United States
Citation
432 U.S. 161
Decided
Confirmed treatments
2
Flagged citations read
146 of 146
Citing cases (total)
146
Treatment dates
1993–2015
Criticized by some courts
At least one reviewed court has criticized this case’s reasoning. No reviewed court has overruled it. Brown v. Ohio has criticized treatment: all 146 flagged citations have been read, and the 2 confirmed treatments are listed below.
Every treatment on this page is written from the citing opinion itself, with a verbatim quote, never copied from a commercial citator. A citation flagged by our screen but not shown here was read and found not to weaken this case.

146 later cases cite Brown v. Ohio; 146 of those citations sat close to treatment language and were flagged for reading, and all of them have been read. Citations that did not sit near treatment language were not flagged and were not read one by one, so a court that weakened this case without using any of that language would not appear here.

Relying on Brown v. Ohio?

This page shows what later courts did to it. Ask about your specific facts and see whether it still carries your argument, with citations you can check.

Treatments

Criticized

  • Justice Scalia, joined only by Justice Kennedy on this portion of the opinion, criticized Brown's footnote 6 as dictum that contradicted the opinion's text and confined Brown's holding to lesser-included offenses.

    United States v. Dixon · Supreme Court of the United States · filed

    Brown v. Ohio, 432 U. S. 161 (1977), contains no support for his position except a footnote that cites Nielsen for the proposition that “[t]he Blockburger test is not the only standard for determining whether successive prosecutions impermissibly involve the same offense.” Brown, supra, at 166-167, n. 6. Not only is this footnote the purest dictum, but it flatly contradicts the text of the opinion which, on the very next page, describes Nielsen as the first Supreme Court case to endorse the Blockburger rule. Brown, supra, at 168. Quoting that suspect dictum multiple times, see post, at 748, 754, cannot convert it into case law.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

Questioned

  • The court held that Dixon and later Ohio precedent cast doubt on the continued viability of Brown's footnote 6 exception and therefore applied Blockburger strictly to the offenses' elements.

    State v. Bridges · Ohio Court of Appeals, Tenth District · filed

    Although some courts have recently cited this exception (see, e.g., State v. Edwards, 8th Dist. No. 94568, 2011-Ohio-95, ¶ 19), a review of subsequent decisions from the United States Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Ohio casts doubt upon its continued viability.
    Read the full opinion on CourtListener →

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