Bowman v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1949
Citation profile
12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently June 2003
12 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 Jarvis v. Commonwealth
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 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“no contrariety in the evidence as to the totally defective condition of the plunger so as to make it completely ineffective in exploding a cartridge therein so as to cause it to fire, nor was there on [the appellant’s] person any part of a completed firing pistol with which the concealed one on appellant’s person could be supplied.... In the absence of such contrariety of proof in this case and where all of it shows that the weapon found on appellant was wholly incapable of being fired, it clearly became the duty of the court to have directed the jury to acquit him.”
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.