People v. Evans’s Empirical Analysis
1967
Citation profile
41 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 41 later decisions — most recently April 1999 · most notably 22 Cal. 3d 388 - Hale v. Morgan (1978), Connelly v. State of California (1970)
41 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 60 Cal. 2d 276 - Professional Fire Fighters, Inc. v. City of Los Angeles · In Re Lane · In Re Hubbard · Ex Parte Daniels · 20 Cal. 2d 366 - Pipoly v. Benson
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 41 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is an emphatic postulate of both civil and penal law that ignorance of a law is no excuse for a violation thereof. Of course it is based on a fiction, because no man can know all the law, but it is a maxim which the law itself does not permit any one to gainsay.... The rule rests on public necessity; the welfare of society and the safety of the state depend upon its enforcement.... [If permitted] the plea [of ignorance] would be universally made, and would lead to interminable questions incapable of solution. Was the defendant in fact ignorant of the law? Was his ignorance of the law excusable? The denser the ignorance the greater would be the exemption from liability. The absurdity of such a condition of the law is shown in the consummate satire of Pascal, where, speaking upon this subject, he says, in substance, that although the less a man thinks of the moral law the more culpable he is, yet under municipal law `the more he relieves himself from a knowledge of his duty, the more approvedly is his duty performed.'”
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.