Bernardini Studios v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
1957
Citation profile
How this case has been cited
Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently March 1970
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
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 5 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It has been pointed out in past decisions that the question is not what in a canonical or liturgical sense is an altar. Congress presumably used the term in the common acceptation thereof. Viewed in that light, we think it is a matter of common knowledge that when an ordinary person, whether he be a visitor, communicant, or member of the congregation, enters a church, synagogue, tern- pie, or other edifice of a religious nature where an altar may be found, and views the structure which is generally raised and is the central or focal point for the services conducted in that place, he regards the entire ensemble of what he sees as an altar. The rather technical points of whether the parts of the entity bear individual names, such as predella, table, retable, or reredos, as in this case, are known to comparatively few persons, other than ecclesiastical experts, and certainly are not part of the common knowledge or speech of the average layman. As an example of this fact, in three of the dictionaries contained in the court’s library, there are illustrations in connection with 'the text of the definition of the noun “altar.” In the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (1889) and the New Century Dictionary (1946), there is a representation of the high altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, and, in Punk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary (1942), there is a representation of the high altar of the Cathedral of Clermont-Perraud, Prance. Each of these illustrations shows not only the”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“Altars, pulpits, communion tables, baptismal fonts, sbrines, or parts of any of tbe foregoing, and statuary (except casts of plaster of paris, or of compositions of paper or papier-mdcbd), imported in good faitb for tbe use of, either by order of or for presentation (without charge) to, any corporation or association organized and operated exclusively for religious purposes.”
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.