Commonwealth v. Chretien’s Empirical Analysis
1981
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 72 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 76 later decisions — most recently January 2025 · most notably Anthony's Pier Four, Inc. v. HBC ASSOCIATES (1991), Commonwealth v. Wilson (1998)
3 federal appellate · 72 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 United States v. Radio Television News Directors Ass'n · Ham v. South Carolina · Hartel v. Long Island Railroad Company · Green v. Richmond · Commonwealth v. Gallant
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 76 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Certainly the constitutional right to confront one's accuser does not extend so far as to entitle the defendant to engage in an unbounded and free-wheeling cross-examination in which the jury are invited to indulge in conjecture and supposition.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“It is widely recognized that use of the word 'unlawful' in rape statutes signifies the incorporation of the common law spousal exclusion”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“should advance rather than defeat the purpose of the statute”
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.