Commonwealth v. Stofchek’s Empirical Analysis
1936
Citation profile
119 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 122 later decisions — most recently December 2018 · most notably County of Allegheny v. Commonwealth (1985), Dornan v. Philadelphia Housing Authority (1938)
119 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 Mugler v. State of Kansas State of Kansas Tufts · United States v. Lanza · Purity Extract & Tonic Co. v. Lynch · People of the State of New York Ex Rel August Silz v. Henry Hesterberg · Vance v. W. A. Vandercook Co.
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 122 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““ ‘The police power is the greatest and most powerful attribute of government; upon it the very existence of the State depends. ... If the exercise of the police power should be in irreconcilable opposition to a constitutional provision or right, the police power would prevail.’ It needs no constitutional reservation or declaration to support it. . . . One of its well known objects is the protection of public health, and laws prohibiting the import, export, sale or transfer of articles deleterious to the public, such as intoxicating liquors are valid under it. . . . What the State can prohibit entirely, it can regulate”.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage““This State has adopted many acts aimed at the beneficial supervision of the traffic in intoxicating liquors. The Brooks High License Law of May, 1887, P. L. 108, restricted the trade in such liquors to licensed persons, and established certain rules for its conduct. Among the objections made to the Brooks' Law was that regulation was thereby taken out of the defined, scope of the police power, in that the State by creating agencies for the sale of intoxicating liquors promoted rather than repressed a public evil. We dismissed this contention in Commonwealth v.' Vigliotti, supra [ 271 Pa. 10 ]. . . . “Appellant urges the same objection to this act, but the establishment of the Liquor Control Board and the State Stores merely supplants the licensing power and distribution medium of the Brooks Law. . . . The fact that the system carries regulation by State Liquor Stores to a higher degree than the licensing system, by placing the sale of liquor directly in the hands of the State, does not militate against the constitutionality of the act. It is rather in aid thereof, as the State can thus exercise a greater measure of control than was possible under the former system. Within the scope of the police power, a State may establish dispensaries for the exclusive sale of intoxicating liquors.””
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.