Commonwealth v. Holmes’s Empirical Analysis
1821
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 1 district · 32 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 51 later decisions (10 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2025 · most notably Roth v. United States (1957), Smith v. People of the State of California (1959)
1 federal appellate · 1 district · 32 state decisions — followed in 14 states
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 51 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It can never be required that an obscene book and picture should be displayed upon the records of the court: which must be done, if the description in these counts is insufficient. This would be to require that the public itself should give permanency and notoriety to indecency, in order to punish it.”
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.