Ely v. State’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

13 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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““Although every citizen has a duty to submit to lawful arrest, he is not required to submit to .an unauthorized or unlawful arrest. “A person who is threatened with the commission of an offense that is classed as an ‘offense against the person,’ such as unlawful arrest or false imprisonment, has two remedies: he may choose to appeal to the law for redress by application for habeas corpus or other appropriate remedy, or he may resort to his right of resistance. If he chooses to resist, he may, however, use only such force as is reasonably necessary to prevent the arrest or to free himself from the illegal restraint. The question as to how far a person may go in resisting an illegal arrest presents a field the limits of which are not exactly defined. On one hand due regard must be had to the preservation of liberty and on the other to the protection of officers of the law. In any event a person has a right under the law, and under the constitutional provision that no citizen is to be deprived of his liberty without due process of law, to extricate himself from an illegal arrest and to use such force and such means as are available to him at the time and as appear to him to be necessary to obtain that end.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Forbau v. State