House v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1969
Citation profile
18 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 28 later decisions — most recently June 2025 · most notably Price v. Commonwealth (1974), Commonwealth v. LaLONDE (1972)
18 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 Roth v. United States · Smith v. People of the State of California · Jacobellis v. Ohio · Book Named 'John Cleland's Memoirs of Woman of Pleasure' v. Attorney General of Commonwealth of Massachusetts · General Electric Co. v. International Union of Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers
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 28 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““[W]hether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards: ‘“(1) The dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest, that is a shameful or morbid interest in nudity and sex; ‘“(2) The material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters; and “ ‘ (3) The material is utterly without redeeming social value.’ ” [ 169 S.E.2d at 576 ]”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““. . . [T]hree elements must coalesce: it must be established that (a) the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex; (b) the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters; and (c) the material is utterly without redeeming social value.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“bound by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States which is the final arbiter of the proper interpretation of the Federal Constitution.”
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.