Evans v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1929
Citation profile
48 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 50 later decisions — most recently March 2005 · most notably Reed v. State (1978), Edwards v. State (1951)
48 state decisions — followed in 15 states
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 Aetna Life Insurance v. Bethel · People v. Weber · Commonwealth v. Sacco · Commonwealth v. Best · Hopkins 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 50 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Ordinarily a witness is said to testify as an expert when a state of facts, observed by some one else, is hypothetically submitted to the witness, and he is asked, in view of those facts, to state what his opinion is, whereas a man skilled in a particular business, who makes his own observations, and testifies to what he has observed and his conclusions therefrom is regarded as a skilled witness. He occupies the same position as any other witness, except that it is recognized that within certain lines he possesses a superior knowledge which enables him to understand, as one without such special knowledge could not, what he has observed.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““No good reason could be given why a witness, when asked.to state the shape of a piece of land, should not be permitted to take a pencil and draw an outline of the shape of it. He might find it very difficult to describe the shape of it, but could illustrate so that it could be clearly understood.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Cook v. Commonwealth
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.