Commonwealth v. Thomas’s Empirical Analysis
1904
Citation profile
11 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently January 2016
11 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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Without undertaking to be technically accurate a ‘purely public charity’ may be determined as one which discharges in whole or in part a duty which the commonwealth owes to its indigent and helpless citizens. Undoubtedly it is the duty of the state to educate its poor children, and thus fit them for discharging the duties of citizenship, to care for the indigent insane, its helpless orphans, and its poor who are sick and afflicted; and therefore any institution which serving no selfish interests discharges in whole or in part any such duty is a purely public charity.””
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.