The citation map
The ten Texas civil decisions cited most often across this library, and the cases in it that reach back to them. One panel per decision, because ten colours on one chart is a rainbow and a rainbow answers nothing.
Measured 2026-09-04 · 260 citing decisions
The center is the decision. Every dot around it is a case in this library that cites it. The shade is the age of the authority at the center, which is the thing worth seeing: a 1983 case still being reached for in 2026 is a rule doing work. The size of the center circle is how heavily the decision is cited.
Ring size is on a log scale relative to these ten, from 4,535 up to 9,761 citing decisions — so the smallest circle here is not a small number, and the figure under each panel is the one to read. It is drawn that way because the alternative saturates: the previous version of this page capped at 35 and drew a decision cited 9,761 times the same size as one cited 4,535 times.
A line here means one decision cited another on a date. It does not mean the case was followed, distinguished, limited or overruled — that judgment is made by editors at West and Lexis and sold, and a map that pretended to it would be guessing in a way you could not check.
And it is drawn from the citations traced so far, not from every citation that exists. A thin panel means this library has traced few links to that decision, which is a fact about the map and not about the case.
6 of these 10 were handed down before 2000, which is why the panels are nearly one colour. That is the finding rather than a flat chart: the decisions being reached for hardest in this library are thirty and forty years old, and the newest of them is the exception.
Both ends of every line are named, because a map that hides its own selection is making a claim about the world. The decisions at the centre are Texas state courts. The cases citing them are Texas state courts, federal district courts in Texas and the Fifth Circuit. Texas decisions citing other Texas decisions account for 3,750,984 of those links. Every slice in this library has had its outbound citations read, so both sides of the conversation are drawn from the same corpus. And it is scoped to civil decisions. 356 of the most-cited decisions in this library are criminal-side standards — sufficiency, evidentiary and factual-sufficiency review — and by raw citation count several of them outrank everything on this page. They are left out because this is a civil litigation practice, not because they are minor. The scope is read off the style of the case, so a criminal appeal not styled against the State would still appear here.
And the slices behind it do not stop on the same day. Texas state courts through 4 September 2026 · the Fifth Circuit through 29 June 2026 · the Texas federal district and bankruptcy courts through 26 June 2026. Nothing is adding to the Fifth Circuit and the Texas federal district and bankruptcy courts, so a Fifth Circuit decision handed down after 29 June 2026 is not a thin line on this page — it is not on this page at all, and neither are the citations it made.
The same graph is what the citation checker walks when it asks whether the authority the other side is leaning on has been touched since they wrote it.
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