Spear v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently August 2000
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.
Relationships
Relies on Stillwell v. Commonwealth · Williams v. Commonwealth · Jackson v. Commonwealth
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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]he production, preparation, propagation, compounding, conversion or processing of any item regulated by [Chapter 15.1 of the Drug Control Act of Virginia] either directly or indirectly by extraction from substances of natural origin, or independently by means of chemical synthesis, or by a combination of extraction and chemical synthesis.”
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.