Metrish v. Lancaster’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

20 federal appellate · 3 district · 22 state decisions

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 76 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[a]n application for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a person in custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court shall not be granted with respect to any claim that was adjudicated on the merits in State court proceedings unless the adjudication of the claim ... resulted in a decision that was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.”

   6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. White v. Woodall · Woods v. Donald

2. “[a]s a condition for obtaining habeas corpus from a federal court, a state prisoner must show that the state court's ruling on the claim being presented in federal court was so lacking in justification that there was an error well understood and comprehended in existing law beyond any possibility for fairminded disagreement.”

   5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. White v. Woodall · Woods v. Donald

3. “[T]he Tennessee court’s abolition of the year and a day rule was not unexpected and indefensible. The year and a day rule is widely viewed as an outdated relic of the common law.... ... [T]he year and a day rule has been legislatively or judicially abolished in the vast majority of jurisdictions recently to have addressed the issue.... Due process, of course, does not require a person to apprise himself of the common law of all 50 States in order to guarantee that his actions will not subject him to punishment in light of a developing trend in the law that has not yet made its way to his State. At the same time, however, the fact that a vast number of jurisdictions have abolished a rule that has so clearly outlived its purpose is surely relevant to whether the abolition of the rule in a particular case can be said to be unexpected and indefensible by reference to the law as it then existed. [[Image here]] There is, in short, nothing to indicate that the Tennessee court’s abolition of the rule in petitioner’s case represented an exercise of the sort of unfair and arbitrary judicial action against which the Due Process Clause aims to protect. Far from a marked and unpredictable departure from prior precedent, the court’s decision was a routine exercise of common law decisionmaking in which the court brought the law into conformity with reason and common sense.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. State of Tennessee v. Terrence Justin Feaster