Williams v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1953
Citation profile
10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently April 2018
10 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 Ingle v. Commonwealth · People v. Liss · Patrick v. Commonwealth · Hampton v. Commonwealth · Commonwealth v. Lewis
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 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“At common law or by very early statute in England, people were prohibited from going armed that they might not terrorize the King's subjects. That was never the law in this country but from an early date, with the invention of small arms, statutes were enacted condemning the practice of carrying a deadly weapon concealed on or about the person. The reason for these statutes, it has been said, is "because persons becoming suddenly angered and having such a weapon in their pocket, would be likely to use it, which in their sober moments they would not have done, and which could not have been done had not the weapon been upon their person."”
2 later decisions 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.