Stabile Registration Case’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

16 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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The fact of any person’s residence, for any legal purpose, whether for voting, or for holding office, or for taxation, has never been determined merely by that person’s “say so”. In determining that question the state brushes aside all color-able pretences and finds the reality behind the guise. ****** . In Fry’s Election Case, 71 Pa. 302 . . . , this court quoted with approval from Story’s Conflict of Laws, sec. 41, as follows: “By the term ‘domicil’ in its ordinary acceptation, is meant the place where a person lives or has his home. In a strict legal sense that is properly the domicil of a person where he has his true, fixed, permanent home arid principal establishment, and to which, whenever he is absent, he has the intention of returning.” Justice Agnew added: “The term residence [as used in the Constitution] means the place where the elector makes his permanent or true home, his principal place of business, and his family residence, if he have one” (italics supplied). ****** . When Stabile and his wife come to that home they come as they would come to a lodging house where they have the right to sleep and to eat and to entertain friends. It is not their permanent home, their place of domestic abode. It is a place where they are only transients, exactly as they would be at a hotel where they had similar privileges. ****** . If by merely obtaining the privilege of occasionally lodging and eating and entertaining in another man’s habitation, a person can obtain “legal resi”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. United States v. Cianciulli

2. ““The courts have never accepted the contention sometimes made that a man’s legal residence is wherever he says it is or where he says he intends it to be. An individual’s legal residence is a question of fact which the state has a paramount interest in determining. A voter can vote only where his legal residence is; he can hold public office only if he resides in the political division his office serves . . . For purposes of certain kinds of taxation, particularly inheritance taxes, each state has a vital interest in the question of the legal residence of the person on whom or on whose estate the tax is to be levied. The fact of any person’s residence, for any legal purpose, whether for voting, or for holding office, or for taxation, has never been determined merely by that person’s ‘say so.’ In determining that question the state brushes aside all colorable pretences and finds the reality behind the guise.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Commonwealth v. Case