Case Map

The Doctrinal Connection Map visualizes how religious liberty cases relate to one another across more than a decade of coverage. Each node represents a case in our library — larger gold nodes are landmark cases referenced in five or more articles, while smaller colored nodes represent the broader case landscape, grouped by doctrinal area. Lines between cases indicate they appear together in the same articles; thicker, brighter lines mean stronger connections.

Use the map to discover how foundational decisions like Employment Division v. Smith or Burwell v. Hobby Lobby radiate outward through subsequent litigation, or to see which doctrinal areas are most densely interconnected. Click any node to see the case’s holding, court, outcome, and a list of its most closely connected cases. Double-click to open the full case profile. Use the topic filter to isolate a single area of law, or search by name to find a specific case and highlight its position in the broader network.

The connections shown here are derived from our editorial archive — cases that appear together in the same articles are treated as related. This reflects how practitioners, scholars, and journalists have actually written about these cases in relation to one another, not just formal citation relationships.

This map is a research aid. Case connections are AI-assisted and based on editorial co-occurrence rather than official legal citation data.