Wolfle v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
291 U.S. 7 · 1934
Citation profile
284 federal appellate · 36 district · 114 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 590 later decisions (34 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 2022 · most notably Pereira v. United States (1954), McNabb v. United States (1943)
284 federal appellate · 36 district · 114 state decisions — followed in 28 states
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.
Appellate journey
reviewedWolfle v. United States (from Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Alford v. United States · Funk v. United States · Hopkins v. Grimshaw · Parkhurst v. . Berdell
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 590 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“the rules governing the competence of witnesses in criminal trials in the federal courts are not necessarily restricted to those local rules enforced at the time of the admission into the union of the particular state where the trial takes place, but are governed by common law principles as interpreted and applied by the federal courts in the light of reason and experience.”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“"The basis of the immunity given to communications between husband and wife is the protection of marital confidences, regarded as so essential to the preservation of the marriage relationship as to outweigh the disadvantages to the administration of justice which the privilege entails. ..... "The privilege suppresses relevant testimony and should be allowed only when it is plain that marital confidence can not otherwise reasonably be preserved. Nothing in this case suggests any such necessity."”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[c]ommunications between the spouses, privately made, are generally assumed to have been intended to be confidential, and hence they are privileged.”
6 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.