Commonwealth v. Zommick’s Empirical Analysis
1949
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 25 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 28 later decisions — most recently February 1980 · most notably Beach v. Government of the District of Columbia (1963), In Re Houghton Estate (1974)
3 federal appellate · 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 Boles's Estate · Harnish's Estate
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 28 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Section 3 of the Act of 1915 provides that ‘The husband, wife, father, mother, child, or children of any person who is an inmate of any asylum, hospital, home, or other institution, maintained in whole or in part by the Commonwealth of' Pennsylvania, and who is legally able so to do, shall be liable to pay for the maintenance of any such person. . . .’ The liability so imposed- is direct and wholly independent of the inmate’s common law liability which Section 1 of the Act declares and continues”: Commonwealth v. Zommick, supra.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage““The analogy to suretyship, of course, connotes that, as to the Commonwealth, the liability of the persons specified in Section 3 is primary. Its enforcement in no wise depends upon the Commonwealth’s establishing antecedently that the recipient of the hospital service continues to be indigent. Indeed, the patient’s financial position is of no materiality to the enforcement of the liability created by Section 3. Consequently, we pass by, as being presently superfluous, any inference, adverse to the father’s contention, to be drawn from his earlier certifications of his son’s indigency, as well as the insufficiency of the testimony which he offered in an ostensible effort to establish the son’s financial ability to pay. What may be the order of liability for such maintenance inter partes, i. e., as between the patient and the persons made liable by Section 3, is a question with which this case is not concerned.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.