Commonwealth v. Leonard’s Empirical Analysis
1996
Citation profile
34 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 34 later decisions — most recently August 2018 · most notably Commonwealth v. Gonsalves (2005), Commonwealth v. Smigliano (1998)
34 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 Terry v. Ohio · United States v. Mendenhall · Delaware v. Prouse · United States v. Brignoni-Ponce · Florida v. Bostick
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 34 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Even if opening an unlocked vehicle door, where the police officer is acting out of concern for the well being of the person inside rather than on the basis of a suspicion of criminality, passes some constitutional threshold requiring constitutionally sufficient justification . . . what [the trooper] did here was a minimally intrusive response to one of the myriad and uncategorizable events that may alert an officer that his assistance may be required.””
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.