Commonwealth v. Leventhal’s Empirical Analysis
1974
Citation profile
51 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 51 later decisions — most recently August 2018 · most notably Commonwealth v. Williams (1979), Commonwealth v. Valliere (1974)
51 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 Ungar v. Sarafite · McGautha v. California · Trujillo v. United States · Commonwealth v. Underwood · Commonwealth v. French
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 51 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The judge was under no obligation to make any disclosure to counsel unless he thought his impartiality might reasonably be questioned. Perhaps out of an abundance of caution, he did raise the question of disqualification. He could not disclose what he did not remember. Counsel decided not to ask for disqualification, and the defendant apparently accepted that decision. The judge was not the trier of fact, and the transcript of [the witness’s] testimony discloses no lack of impartiality. We think the argument that a forgotten thirty-five year old letter of recommendation changes the entire picture borders on the frivolous.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Price v. Clayton“[A] party cannot disqualify a judge to sit in his case by bringing an action against him after the principal suit is commenced. Nor is a judge disqualified because he is made a formal party as a method of seeking review of his rulings; to be disqualifying, the bias and prejudice must rise from an extrajudicial source and not from something learned from participation in the case.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“The touchstone for the principle of judicial impartiality are the words memorialized in art. 29 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, requiring that judges be "as free, impartial and independent as the lot of humanity will admit”
1 later decision 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.