Waggoner v. Atkins’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

6 state decisions

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 6 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “If the brain has become so affected, irrespective of cause, as to appreciably contracept a person’s power to reason, and in consequence the ordinary affairs of life are but dimly reflected on that mirror called mind, it is generally agreed that the impulse to act is not a result of intellectual motivation; hence, the attendant infirmity intervenes and protects one so afflicted from the penalty of conduct in respect of which the power to think and to plan according to accepted formulas is non-existent.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Barre v. Hoffman