Cleveland v. United States’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

241 federal appellate · 31 district · 96 state decisions

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 534 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““What Congress has outlawed by the Mann Act, however, is the use of interstate commerce as a calculated means for effectuating sexual immorality.””

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Reamer v. United States · United States v. Mathison

2. “Under the ejusdem generis rule of construction the general words are confined to the class and may not be used to enlarge it”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Holder v. Hall · United States v. Haldeman

3. “The danger of imputing to Congress, as a result of its failure to take positive or affirmative action through normal legislative processes, ideas entertained by the Court concerning Congress' will, is illustrated most dramatically perhaps by the vacillating and contradictory courses pursued in the long line of decisions imputing to 'the silence of Congress' varied effects in commerce clause cases. That danger may be and often is equally present in others. More often than not the only safe assumption to make from Congress' inaction is simply that Congress does not intend to act at all. (Cf. United States v. American Trucking Assoc., 310 U.S. 534, 550 [ 60 S.Ct. 1059 , 84 L.Ed. 1345 ].) At best the contrary view can be only an inference, altogether lacking in the normal evidences of legislative intent and often subject to varying views of that intent. In short, although recognizing that by silence Congress at times may be taken to acquiesce and thus approve, we should be very sure that, under all the circumstances of a given situation, it has done so before we so rule and thus at once relieve ourselves from and shift to it the burden of correcting what we have done wrongly. The matter is particular, not general, notwithstanding earlier exceptional treatment and more recent tendency. Just as dubious legislative history is at time much overridden, so also is silence or inaction often mistaken for legislation.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Rosemary Properties, Inc. v. McColgan