Commonwealth v. Hallberg’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

3 federal appellate · 10 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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[t]he object of the Constitutional provision ... is obvious, namely, to enable both the legislators themselves and all persons interested in the legislation to see exactly the changes made between the existing law and the re-enact ment, without the necessity of referring to the former for comparison ..., whereas if the portion to be abrogated were simply deleted, it would be impossible to determine whether such deletion represented an actual legislative intention to abrogate such part of the law or was due to a mere error or oversight in the publication of the amendatory legislation. We are strengthened in this conclusion by the well-known, uniform practice, long existent, of legislative draftsmen thus to place in brackets all parts of an existing law intended to be abrogated, as well as by the general understanding that such abrogation is to be deemed to occur only when so indicated.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. Sprague v. Cortes · Pennsylvanians Against Gambling Expansion Fund, Inc. v. Commonwealth