Commonwealth v. Messinger’s Empirical Analysis
1808
Citation profile
10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 11 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2012
10 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“I fully assent to the established principle, that penal laws are to be construed strictly, and that they are not to be carried beyond their letter.... It is sufficient to state that our books teem with authorities, shewing that penal statutes shall not be construed beyond this strict letter.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.