Blau v. United States’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

235 federal appellate · 15 district · 73 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 461 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[T]he Government insists that [the party claiming the privilege] should be denied the benefit of the privilege because he failed to prove that the information was privately conveyed. This contention ignores the rule that marital communications are presumptively confidential. The Government made no effort to overcome the presumption.”

   4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 720 So. 2d 1043 - Hall v. State · Kristopher C. Edwards v. A. Lamarque, Warden

2. “"The basis of the immunity given to communications between husband and wife is the protection of marital confidences, regarded as so essential to the preservation of the marriage relationship as to outweigh the disadvantages to the administration of justice which the privilege entails. ..... "The privilege suppresses relevant testimony and should be allowed only when it is plain that marital confidence can not otherwise reasonably be preserved. Nothing in this case suggests any such necessity."”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. 352 So. 2d 45 - Kerlin v. State

3. “wherever a communication, because of its nature or the circumstances under which it was made, was obviously not intended to be confidential, it is not a privileged communication.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. United States v. Montgomery