Brennan v. Election Commissioners’s Empirical Analysis
1942
Citation profile
2 district · 30 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 32 later decisions — most recently March 2009 · most notably Pielech v. Massasoit Greyhound, Inc. (1996), City of Boston v. Barry (1944)
2 district · 30 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 Commonwealth v. Chance · Commonwealth v. S. S. Kresge Co. · Cheney v. Coughlin · Rosenthal v. Nove · Dowling v. Board of Assessors
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 32 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Nevertheless it remains true that ‘may’ is not an apt word to express a positive mandate. It is a word of permission and not of command. It should be construed, if possible, in accordance with its true signification.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.