Willis v. Jonson’s Empirical Analysis
1938
Citation profile
10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently February 1999
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 Zimmerman v. Brooks · Scotten v. Longfellow · Scott v. McCreary · Brown v. Moss · Griffin v. Powell
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 10 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The General Assembly shall assign the cities and towns of the Commonwealth to the classes to which they respectively belong, and change assignments made as the population of said cities and towns may increase or decrease and in the absence of other satisfactory information as to their population, shall be governed by the last preceding federal census in so doing; but no city or town shall be transferred from one class to another, except in pursuance of a law previously enacted and providing therefor.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Holsclaw v. Stephens“the Constitution limits the right of the [General Assembly] to act to certain factual situations only, it is the duty of the courts, in the protection of constitutional guaranties, to determine the existence or nonexistence of the facts authorizing legislative action. In other words, the [General Assembly] cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps in violation of the Constitution by a mere process of finding purported facts which do not exist and then act upon the authority of such finding.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority““ (1) It was the duty of the Legislature in the creation of a new district to have due regard to territory, business and population; and (2) it is our duty to examine the facts in order to determine whether or not there was any evidence to support the legislative conclusion that a new district was necessary.””
1 later decision 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.