Commonwealth v. Chambers’s Empirical Analysis
1951
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 41 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 44 later decisions — most recently February 1980 · most notably Commonwealth v. Kloiber (1954), Commonwealth v. Sullivan (1977)
3 federal appellate · 41 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 Commonwealth v. Simmons · Commonwealth v. Jones · Commonwealth v. Bryant · Commonwealth v. Foster · DeBolt v. Baldwin Township
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 44 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Defendant contends that the veracity of his story about Phillips was of very great importance to him because if the jury believed defendant was only a look-out and that the brutal beating had been committed by Bryant and Phillips and not by him, the sentence might have been life imprisonment instead of death. With this contention we agree. In the light of this we shall examine the court's charge to which the defendant objects.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“What is the use of this Court saying that it is sometimes the duty of a trial Judge to express his own opinion of the guilt or innocence of the defendant (provided he tells them that he leaves the question of guilt or innocence to them), and then stating that it is reversible error for the trial Judge to say exactly what this Court said he could say? . . .”
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.