State v. Blaisdell’s Empirical Analysis
1919
Citation profile
16 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently July 1978
16 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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The amendment enlarges the offense from a misdemeanor to a felony and was in force when the act complained of was committed. While the rule requiring strict construction of penal statutes was more rigorously applied in former times, when the number of capital offenses was more than one hundred and sixty, yet the rule still obtains, and is so well recognized that citation of authorities is unnecessary. And the rule is equally well established that ‘the degree of strictness applied to the construction of a penal statute depends in great measure upon the severity of the statute.’ Endlich on the Interpretation of Statutes, Sec. 334. As a corollary to this rule it follows that a statute declaring an act to be a felony calls for more strict construction than one which declares an act to be a misdemeanor.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Smith v. State
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.