Commonwealth v. Wilkins’s Empirical Analysis
1922
Citation profile
33 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 35 later decisions — most recently November 2006 · most notably Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission v. Israel (1947), Commonwealth v. Amer. Baseball Club of Phila. (1927)
33 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 Commonwealth ex rel. Attorney General v. Mathues · Commonwealth ex rel. Bell v. Powell · Stegmaier v. Jones · Stull v. Reber · Commonwealth v. Smith
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 35 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““It might just as well be said that because an act simply provided that embezzlement of public funds should be punished by fine and imprisonment, there could be no recovery by a civil action against the embezzler. It is rare, indeed, that a statute expresses the fact that existing remedies for its enforcement are reserved, nor is it requisite it should do so; yet this is the necessary conclusion from the opinion below, which says, in effect, that because no such reservation is expressed, the legislature must have intended that, by simply paying a fine, public officials, charged with the duty of preventing the spread of contagious diseases, can obtain a right to neglect their duty and subject the people to the risk of contagion, against which the statute was intended to secure them. This is, of course, unsupposable; when the Commonwealth declares her public policy on such important State matters, instead of it being necessary to reserve the right to proceed, the courts will always presume — in the absence of an express provision otherwise — that she retains the right to pursue every existing means necessary to compel her officials to enforce that policy. . . . “Can a public officer be compelled to perform the duties of his office, even though he may be punishable by fine or imprisonment, or both, if he does not? Upon this point there should not be any doubt; nor is there in this State.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage““. . . Its evident purpose is that the Commonwealth, when suing in her own right, shall be allowed to prosecute her claims at the seat of government, and not be required to go to other parts of the State, where the defendants happen to reside. The fact that, under other legislation, she has also the privilege of proceeding wherever the defendants may be found and served with process, is beside the question; for this does not repeal the Act of 1870, either expressly or by implication, and hence she still has the absolute right to litigate her claims in Dauphin County, if she chooses so to do.””
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.