In re Aaron D.’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

3 federal appellate · 16 state decisions

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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““. . . What the Constitution interdicts is not self incrimination but involuntary self incrimination. Unfortunately the tendency to pare away the limits of what is voluntary by successive interpretations of prior interpretations has left this distinction with such a small basis that it is not astonishing that it is either not recognized or passed over lightly with a modicum of lip service. And so it is that while the rule is announced that even in the absence of counsel the confession may be admissible provided the greatest care is taken to assure that it is voluntary (Matter of Gault, supra, p. 55), little by little circumstances in a particular case which are held to show a lack of voluntary admission are further extended in the next one. In Matter of William L. (29 A D 2d 182), the boy’s mother was advised by the police that the matter was not serious and she was discouraged from carrying out her original plan to accompany him. Here she was invited to attend, but this is discounted because the officer described the incident as a stabbing and not a homicide. Many years ago a distinguished jurist warned against just such a ratio decidendi, which he called ‘a jurisprudence of conceptions’ (Roscoe Pound, ‘Mechanical Jurisprudence’, 8 Col. L. Rev. 605, 610, quoted by Cardozo, J., in Hynes v. New York Cent. R. R. Co., 231 N. Y. 229 , 235). The net result is that while voluntariness is shown by uncontested facts, involuntariness is found by quotations from prior decisions. “When ”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. State v. Young