Maryland v. Soper’s Empirical Analysis
270 U.S. 36 · 1926
Citation profile
24 federal appellate ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 65 later decisions (21 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2015 · most notably Screws v. United States (1945), Stefanelli v. Minard (1951)
24 federal appellate ·
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 In re Neagle · Johnson v. State of Maryland · In re Loney · State of Virginia v. Felts · Commonwealth of Virginia v. De Hart
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 65 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Counsel for the state of Maryland argue that the accused officers were in no sense acting in their official capacity when engaged in the alleged conspiracy to deceive the coroner; that their duty had been discharged when they destroyed the still, that their subsequent reports of what had happened to their federal superiors are not the subject of this prosecution; that the indictments for conspiracy and perjury were based not on acts which the defendants had done in pursuance of federal law and in discharge of their duty to the federal government, but on testimony given by them under their obligations to the state as individuals and for which they were detained in jail. To this it is answered, on behalf of the United States, as follows: “ ‘But how did the officers come to be in jail? If they had not been engaged in the performance of their duties as federal officers they would never have been there. When they found Wenger’s body, they had just come from performing their duty, and were on their way back to report officially to their superior. At that time they were still acting in their official capacity. United States v. Gleason, [Fed.Cas. No. 15,215], 1 Wool.C.C. 128. In immediately seeking for a physician and in reporting Wenger’s death at once to the state’s attorney, they were doing the only reasonable act which could be expected of them, both as public officers and' as private citizens. But, as their petition alleges, the state’s attorney, on being informed by them that ”
3 later decisions 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.