Commonwealth v. Belanger’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

5 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 5 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “We ... understand the practical difficulty an [owner of property] may have in finding the way to and through the statutes of Massachusetts. A set of the General Laws is not standard equipment on the backbar of the average [property owner]. That difficulty, however, is not peculiar to the statutory scheme in question but pertains to the whole vast underbrush of statutes and regulations which govern the lives of the inhabitants of the Commonwealth or the country, whether the subject is conditions of employment, health, the manufacture and distribution of food, the sale of securities, the lending of money, the sale of alcoholic beverages, waste disposal, or something else. When statutes impose punishment out of considerations of public policy, lack of knowledge of the law or of the fact that the law has been violated does not exonerate the person who may have unwittingly violated the statute.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 30 Mass. L. Rptr. 500 - Commonwealth v. Einis