Johnson's Case’s Empirical Analysis
1945
Citation profile
41 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 41 later decisions — most recently March 2015 · most notably Selectmen of Topsfield v. State Racing Commission (1949), Harborview Residents' Committee, Inc. v. Quincy Housing Authority (1975)
41 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 Young v. Duncan · Morrison v. Selectmen of Weymouth · Di Clavio's Case · Commonwealth v. Bloomberg · Brown v. Robinson
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 41 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is settled that a statute `as a whole ought, if possible, to be so construed as to make it an effectual piece of legislation in harmony with common sense and sound reason,' Morrison v. Selectmen of Weymouth, 279 Mass. 486, 492 [1932]; Beloin v. Bullett, 310 Mass. 206, 210 [1941]; that it is to be interpreted in the light of the pre-existing state of the law and the main object to be accomplished, Acford v. Auditor of Cambridge, 300 Mass. 391, 395 [1938]; and that repeals by implication have never been favored by our law. Commonwealth v. Bloomberg, 302 Mass. 349, 352 [1939].”
1 later decision 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.