Sweat v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1929
Citation profile
8 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 9 later decisions — most recently December 1995
8 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 Joseph Lochner v. People of the State of New York · Henning Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts · Allgeyer v. State of Louisiana · Crowley v. Christensen · Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad v. McGuire
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 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“For some time prior to 1918, the money loan sharks and salary-buyers were doing business in Virginia and elsewhere, and often imposed upon the ignorant and the needy by making small loans to them upon unfair and unjust terms. In 1918, Virginia enacted her first uniform small loan law (Acts 1918, chapter 402) to regulate the manner of conducting this business.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“"This act is remedial in character and its apparent purpose is to throw around transactions such as that involved in this case such safeguards as will protect the wage earner who may be a party to them from the greed and the rapacity of unscrupulous persons who might exploit his necessities and misfortunes to his loss and their profit."”
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.