Commonwealth v. Murray’s Empirical Analysis
1966
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 2 district · 57 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 71 later decisions — most recently October 2019 · most notably 340 Pa. Super. 318 - Commonwealth v. Hassine (1985), Marks v. Bell Tel. Co. of Penn. (1975)
3 federal appellate · 2 district · 57 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
Applies 47 U.S.C. § 605
Relies on Kotteakos v. United States · Nardone v. United States · Olmstead v. United States · Rathbun v. United States · Monroe 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 71 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“One of the pursuits of happiness is privacy. The right of privacy is as much property of the individual as the land to which he holds title and the clothing he wears on his back..... The greatest joy that can be experienced by mortal man is to feel himself master of his fate,-this in small as well as in big things. Of all the precious privileges and prerogatives in the crown of happiness which every American citizen has the right to wear, none shines with greater luster and imparts more innate satisfaction and soulful contentment to the wearer than the golden, diamond-studded right to be let alone. Everything else in comparison is dross and sawdust.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“[I]f detectives and private intermeddlers may, without legal responsibility, peer through keyholes, eavesdrop at the table, listen at the transom and over the telephone, and crawl under the bed, then all constitutional guarantees become meaningless aggregation of words, as disconnected as a broken necklace whose beads have scattered on the floor.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“It is clear ... that the privacy of the telephoning public is the interest which must first arrest one’s attention in dealing with this problem. A mere passing acquaintance with the daily newspaper suffices to substantiate the existence of a widely felt and insidious threat to individual privacy posed, not only by technological advances, but also by the evolution of contemporary social structures. A jealous regard for individual privacy is a judicial tradition of distinguished origin, buttressed in many areas by the imperative mandate of constitutional guarantees. Protection of individual privacy, however, appears frequently to reduce the methods available to law enforcement agencies in the detection and prosecution of crime. New would deny that in this country today concern with the growth of criminal activity is of the same order of magnitude as the concern with the erosion of individual privacy.”
2 later decisions 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.