State v. Watkins’s Empirical Analysis
1933
Citation profile
42 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 44 later decisions — most recently October 2013 · most notably State Ex Rel. Porterie v. Smith (1935), State v. Rodriguez (1980)
42 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 State ex rel. New Orleans Canal & Banking Co. v. Heard · State ex rel. Nicholls v. Shakespeare · State ex rel. Hall v. Judge of the Tenth Judicial District
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 44 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is the duty of a district attorney to enforce the criminal laws of the state, and, above all, to support the Constitution of the state. If, in the performance of his duty he finds two statutes in conflict with each other, or one which repeals another, and if, in his judgment, one of the two statutes is unconstitutional, it is his duty to enforce the other; and, in order to do so, he is compelled to submit to the court, by way of a plea, that one of the statutes is unconstitutional. If it were not so, the power of the Legislature would be free from constitutional limitations in the enactment of criminal laws.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Chastain“"That principle does not forbid the Legislature to enact local laws dependent for their effect upon a vote of the electors of the locality to be affected, or to enact a general law or municipal charter to govern only such municipalities as may see fit to adopt it by a majority vote of the electors in the municipality."”
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.