Smith v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
15 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 15 later decisions — most recently May 2016
15 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 Wong Sun v. United States · Ohio Bureau of Employment Services v. Hodory · Barrett v. United States · United States v. Ceccolini · Goldman v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc.
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 15 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The privilege against self-incrimination is a personal right of the witness, and one that the witness is in a position to protect by his own means. Commonwealth v. Simpson, [ 370 Mass. 119 , 345 N.E.2d 899, 902 (1976)]. Goldstein v. United States, 316 U.S. 114 , 121 n. 11, 62 S.Ct. 1000 , 1004 n. 11, 86 L.Ed. 1312 (1942). Moreover, the statutory procedure for a grant of immunity is designed to accommodate the witness’s rights and the State’s need for evidence. The statute is simply not addressed to the interests of defendants.”
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.