Jonhs v. Gavins’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

9 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 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““By the common law, a statute took effect at once throughout the jurisdiction to be governed by it. So it did under our former constitution, where there was no express legislative direction on the subject. In England, a statute took effect from the first day of the session of parliament enacting it. In this state, under the former constitution, from the time it was ‘published in print, by authority, at any place within the state.’ Tredway v. Gapin, 1 Blackf. 299 . It had, however, before the framing of the new constitution, become a common practice for the legislature to provide that laws should take effect in each county when filed therein, thus producing, for a considerable length of time, an entire want of uniformity in the laws in force. “In this state of things, the constitutional convention framed the provision we have quoted, declaring that no law should take effect till it was ‘published’ and ‘circulated’ (two words, as here used, meaning the same thing) ‘in the several counties of this state;’ and we think the intention was to arrest the piecemeal mode in which laws had, for a time, been brought into operation, and to make their taking effect a single entire thing throughout the state. It seems to us that the language of the constitution will fairly admit of no other construction. It speaks of no partial taking effect of a law, no coming into force in the different or several counties, but it speaks of its taking effect as a single event, after distribution in the se”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 177 Ind. App. 488 - Lohm v. State