Thomas v. Elash

Superior Court of Pennsylvania

Decided July 25, 2001

Superior Court of Pennsylvania · decided 2001-07-25

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 2001-07-25

How this case has been cited

Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently February 2021

12 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.

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¶1Dissenting Opinion filed by

STEVENS, J.

¶2¶ 1 I respectfully disagree with the Majority’s sweeping policy proclamation that “... the prisoner mailbox rule applies to all pro se legal filings by incarcerated litigants.” Rather, I would address the issue on a case-by-case basis consistent with established case law.

¶3¶2 Moreover, sweeping policy changes in the law should come from the duly elected state legislators, not the court. Any extension of the prisoner mailbox rule to civil cases, therefore, is a question to be decided by the Pennsylvania Legislature, where the issue can be appropriately debated in an open and public forum.