Commonwealth v. Welch’s Empirical Analysis
1995
Citation profile
2 district · 52 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 54 later decisions — most recently October 2021 · most notably Commonwealth v. Williams (1996), Commonwealth v. O'Day (2003)
2 district · 52 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 Aguilar v. Texas · Spinelli v. United States · Draper v. United States · Rawlings v. Kentucky · Adair v. United States
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 54 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The police observed a man, matching the description given by the informant, arrive at the stated location, shortly before 8 P.M., in a Mercury station wagon. The police also observed a fire department decal on the window of the station wagon, which supported the informant’s claim that the defendant was a firefighter.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“Although art. 14 [of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights] and the Fourth Amendment [to the United States Constitution] guard against both, a search and a seizure are distinct legal concepts.”
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.