Commonwealth v. Giles’s Empirical Analysis
1966
Citation profile
25 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 25 later decisions — most recently October 2016 · most notably 22 Mass. App. Ct. 10 - Commonwealth v. Miranda (1986), Commonwealth v. McDuffee (1979)
25 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 Russell v. United States · Lanzetta v. State New Jersey · Sinclair v. United States · Consolidated Edison Co. of New York v. United States · De Moss v. United States
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 25 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“No standard is set by the words “other legal justification for requiring an oath in particular circumstances” or by the words “where the oath-reasonably should be regarded as ‘required by law.’ ” These words, engrafted on the statute by the majority, not only leave their meaning and applicability to the judiciary, but they implicitly require tíre court, as each case arises, to supply an essential element of the crime, namely, the particular oath, whether required by statute or not, to which the penalty for false swearing attaches. Penal statutes should not be left in such a peripatetic state. From the founding of the Commonwealth public policy has been against such enactments. “The public policy of the Commonwealth in the creation of crimes is not for this court to determine, but for the Legislature. Our function is merely that of discovering the meaning of the words that the Legislature has used, bearing in mind that under the American system of law a citizen is not to be punished criminally unless his deed falls plainly within the words of the statutory prohibition, construed naturally. His deed is not to be declared a crime upon ambiguous words or by a strained construction.” [Citation omitted.]”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Douglas
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.