Moon v. Mayor’s Empirical Analysis
1905
Citation profile
42 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 42 later decisions — most recently June 2005 · most notably Kelly v. Chicago Park District (1951), 9 Ill. 2d 429 - The People v. Woodruff (1956)
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 People ex rel. Winstanley v. Weber
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 42 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The petition set forth the adoption by the city council of the city of Champaign of an ordinance establishing a police department. Section 355 of this ordinance, which seems to be relied on by appellant as creating the office of policeman, is as follows: ‘The police department of the city of Champaign shall consist of the mayor, the aldermen, the police magistrate, who shall be ex officio members of the police department, and a chief of police, and as many policemen as the city council may from time to time provide for, and one keeper of the city prison, and such other officers as are given police power by ordinance of the city.’ This section of the ordinance does no more than to create the police department of the city and to declare what officers of the city should compose the department. The provision that the police department should consist, in part, of ‘as many policemen as the city council may from time to time provide for,’ cannot be construed to create any one or more offices of policemen of the city. Its true meaning is that the police department of the city shall comprise such policemen as shall be legally invested with that office. The section does not itself purport to create the office of policeman, and it has no such legal effect. It does not appear from the petition that the city council had before that adopted an ordinance creating the offices of policemen of the city or that such an ordinance has since then been adopted. The office of policeman or police pa”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Holcombe v. Grota
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.