Lynch v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1921
Citation profile
10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently May 2019
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.
Relationships
Relies on Hicks v. Commonwealth · Berkeley v. Commonwealth
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 10 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Berkeley’s Case, 88 Va. 1017 , 14 S.E. 916 , ... was a prosecution for an assault. It is true that the opinion of the court in that case quotes with approval extracts from Davis Cr. Law and Russell on Crimes, in which the statement is made that “to constitute an assault, there must be present ability to inflict an injury,” yet, as indicated in the very extracts quoted, this statement is subject to the qualification that if the threatened conduct is such that it puts the person assailed in such apparent peril as to create in him the reasonable belief that he is in peril, the assault will be complete, although it may be that the person making the assault did not in truth have the present ability to inflict the threatened injury. As said in Bish. New Cr. Law (8th ed.), sec. 32, on the subject of what constitutes an assault: “There is no need for the party assailed to be put in actual peril, if only a well-founded apprehension is created. For his suffering is the same in the one case as in the other, and the breach of the public peace is the same. To illustrate: ... If, within shooting distance, one menacingly points at another with a gun, apparently loaded, yet not in fact, he commits an assault the same as if it were loaded.” Thereupon, Mr. Bishop proceeds to lay down what is undoubtedly the correct rule on the subject, in the following words: “There must be some power, actual or apparent, of doing bodily harm; but apparent power is sufficient. In the instance we are referring ”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.