Pinpoint citation features · tour · Go Syfert

Pinpoint citation analytics

When one opinion quotes another, we keep track of it. Every quoted passage. Every cite. The pages below cut that record different ways. Leaderboards. Search. Time series. Related passages. Court patterns. Most case pages also carry small widgets from the same data.

Start the tour

One case shows it all. Anderson v. Liberty Lobby.

The most-cited case in the corpus. Visit its case page and every widget fires at once. The pinpoint badge, the authority rank, the citer-court chips, the famous passages panel with the canonical summary-judgment language. Click any famous passage to see a drill-down with a year-by-year sparkline and the related passages.

Open Anderson v. Liberty Lobby →
For the paragraph-cite badges, try Anders v. Cal. Dept. of Corrections, 375 F.3d 206. Paragraph 67 carries a ▸9 badge.
Cross-case explorations

Famous passages

The most-quoted passages in American case law, sorted by how often other cases pin-cite them. Iqbal’s “threadbare recitals” sits on top at 2,456 cites.

Open the leaderboard →

Search the quotation corpus

Full-text search across every famous passage. Try a phrase or a single legal term.

Search “qualified immunity” →

Trending passages

Quotes that the courts have started using a lot more in the last three years. Twombly’s “plausible grounds” passage is currently surging.

See what’s surging →

Authority leaderboard

Cases ranked by how often they are cited by other cases that are themselves cited a lot. Anderson, Iqbal, Strickland, Celotex, Monell, Chevron, all in the top fifteen. Toggle to raw pin-cite count and Chevron jumps to #3.

By authority →  ·  By raw cite count →

Per-court citation patterns

Which authorities each court pin-cites the most. The Ninth and Second Circuits lead in raw output. District courts dominate the citers of Anderson’s summary-judgment language.

Browse by court →

Drill-down, sparkline, related passages

Click any passage anywhere on the site. You will see every case that cites it, a year-by-year sparkline, a growing-steady-declining trend label, and the passages most often co-cited with it.

Sample: the Twombly plausibility passage →
Per-case widgets. These appear automatically on case pages.

Pinpoint citation badge

The right-column line that reads N passages pin-cited by M cases.” Click for every citing case and the quoted text.

Paragraph-cite badges

On older F.2d and F.3d opinions, a small ▸N superscript appears next to paragraphs that are cited by two or more cases.

Pinpoint authority rank

The “Pinpoint authority: #N” line. The top fifty thousand cases get a precise rank. The rest get a percentile bucket.

Citer-court distribution

Top citer-court chips, like “Citer courts: 9th Cir. (203) · 2nd Cir. (87) …”. Each chip links to the per-court leaderboard.

Famous passages panel

The ivory panel below the case header. It shows the top three passages the case is most often quoted for. Each passage links to its own drill-down.