Commonwealth v. Hall’s Empirical Analysis
1948
Citation profile
30 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 36 later decisions (4 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2025 · most notably Cruzan Ex Rel. Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health (1990), Commonwealth v. Gallison (1981)
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 Purinton v. Jamrock · Inhabitants of Somerset v. Inhabitants of Dighton · State v. Noakes · Commonwealth v. Dornes · Commonwealth v. Venuti
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 36 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The jury could have found on the foregoing evidence that the baby died of starvation and dehydration resulting from the intentional conduct of the defendant in placing it in the attic and withholding food and liquids from it. While the precise question seems never to have been decided in this Commonwealth, we have no doubt that such conduct in the circumstances obtaining here would constitute murder at common law.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage““ ‘But it has never been doubted that if death is the direct consequence of the malicious omission of the performance of a duty (as of a mother to nourish her infant child) this is a case of murder. If the omission was not malicious and arose from negligence only, it is a case of manslaughter.’ ””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Shephard
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.