Sears v. State’s Empirical Analysis
1993
Citation profile
31 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 32 later decisions — most recently July 2023 · most notably DeYoung v. State (1997), Wellons v. State (1995)
31 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 Crawford v. State · Isaacs v. State · Mooney v. State · Ingram v. State · Parks v. State
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 32 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The focus here is not on bias in fact but whether the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, keeping in mind the reality that any judge will have come to the bench after having had extensive contacts with the community and the legal profession. . . . Any analysis of the necessity for recusal is necessarily fact-bound, requiring an examination of the nature and extent of any business, personal, social or political associations, and an exercise of judgment concerning just how close and how extensive (and how recent) these associations are or have been. 32”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Robert Trim v. State
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.