Shelton v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1911
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 34 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 38 later decisions — most recently February 2018 · most notably McAffee v. United States (1939), Bradley v. Commonwealth (1923)
2 federal appellate · 34 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 38 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“If, in shooting at any of the persons with whom he was engaged in a difficulty, appellant acted in his necessary self-defense, and one of the bullets shot at them accidentally killed Martha Pigg, the act would be excused by the law as an unavoidable casualty.”
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.