334 Pa. Super. 513 - Commonwealth v. Waters’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
52 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 52 later decisions — most recently October 2010 · most notably Commonwealth v. Albert (2000), 339 Pa. Super. 32 - Commonwealth v. Hernandez (1985)
52 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 Furman v. Georgia · Atchison Co v. Matthews · National Labor Relations Board v. Burns International Security Services, Inc. · Ripon Society, Inc. v. National Republican Party · Commonwealth v. McCutchen
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 52 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The Fourteenth Amendment forbids arbitrary discrimination by States against persons or classes but it permits the Commonwealth, as part of its police power, to create and define a criminal offense through classifications of persons so long as these classifications are reasonable and the legislation bears equally on all in the same class ... Thus a classification will be held valid if there is any conceivable basis upon which it may relate to a legitimate government interest.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage““... our legislature has seen fit to impose a mandatory life sentence, choosing to deny the judiciary the discretion allowed in sentencing many other types of offenders.” Commonwealth v. Waters, 334 Pa. Superior Ct. 513, 526 , 483 A.2d 855, 861 (1984).”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.