United States v. Kessler’s Empirical Analysis
213 F.2d 53 · 1954
Citation profile
18 federal appellate · 1 district · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 30 later decisions — most recently June 1999 · most notably Corrado v. United States (1955), United States v. Montalbano (1956)
18 federal appellate · 1 district · 1 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
Applies 18 U.S.C. § 1015 · 8 U.S.C. § 1451 (§ 340 of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (McCarran-Walter))
Relies on Schneiderman v. United States · Baumgartner v. United States · Wortex Mills, Inc. v. Textile Workers Union of America · People v. . Marendi · 113 F. Supp. 783 - United States v. Accardo
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 30 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““ * * * (O)ne cannot claim that a person was arrested for ‘Obstructing highway’, a crime then, and probably now, unknown to the law of Pennsylvania, and assert that the arrest was one made in accordance with law. We therefore disagree with the ruling of the court below that the arrests were legal and valid. See 104 F.Supp. at page 437. As a matter of law they were illegal and invalid. They were at best ‘false arrests’, Meyers v. Tygh, 1920, 75 Pa.Super. 271, 272 , and as a matter of law Kessler was subjected to ‘false imprisonments.’” 213 F.2d at page 56 . “We are also of the opinion that if the term ‘arrested’ as used in Question 29 was intended to include a false or illegal arrest at least of the kind to which Kessler was subjected, the Immigration and Naturalization Service passed beyond the borders of its statutory authority. It was the intention of Congress in enacting the Naturalization Act of 1929, as it was in enacting the earlier and later Acts governing naturalization and immigration, to exact from the applicant for citizenship any information which would be pertinent to and shed light upon the moral character of the applicant. The ‘false arrest’ to which Kessler was subjected affirmatively appears as false as a matter of law on the face of the record—the magistrate’s docket—because the ‘arrest’ was for a purported offense which had no existence in the law of Pennsylvania. The persons who made the ‘arrests’ were mere trespassers. See Baird v. Householder, 1858, 32 P”
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.