Davis v. Straub’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

15 federal appellate · 3 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 23 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Independent of those [answers] which relate to the structure of the government, we find the following: ----Section 9 [Article I] clause 2 — "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it [T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instrument of tyranny. The observations of the judicious Blackstone, in reference to the latter, are well worthy of recital: ... "confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him to jail, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten, is a less public, a less striking, and, therefore a more dangerous engine of arbitrary government.” And as a remedy for this fatal evil he [Blackstone] is everywhere peculiarly emphatical in his encomiums on the habeascorpus act, which in one place he calls "the Bulwark of the British Constitution.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. Davis v. Straub

2. “As the Supreme Court foresaw in Walker and Mitchell, there reaches a point where a piece of evidence — in this case Jourdan’s presence at the scene of the crime — which all parties agree is only incriminating in the most minimal and remote way, is so overwhelmingly and definitively established that it cannot be constitutionally used to stonewall introduction of other evidence that is highly exculpatory of a criminal defendant. The Fifth Amendment may not be so prompted and used as a shield for the flaw in the state’s case, [or] used in such a mechanistic way that it subsumes a criminal defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to present a defense.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Davis v. Straub

3. “If the rule in question is one which of necessity requires a case-by-case examination of the evidence, then we can tolerate a number of specific applications without saying that those applications themselves create a new rule ... Where the beginning point is a rule of this general application, a rule designed for the specific purpose of evaluating a myriad of factual contexts, it will be the infrequent case that yields a result so novel that it forges a new rule, one not dictated by precedent.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Davis v. Straub