Commonwealth v. MacDonald’s Empirical Analysis
1975
Citation profile
67 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 69 later decisions — most recently February 2026 · most notably Commonwealth v. Cropper (1975), Commonwealth v. Brion (1994)
67 state decisions — followed in 10 states
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 Grayned v. City of Rockford · Cantwell v. State of Connecticut · Miller v. California · Grayned v. City of Rockford · Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton
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 69 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“What is encountered with the sprawling doctrine of public nuisance is an attempt to restrict First Amendment rights by means analogous to those under “a statute sweeping in a great variety of conduct under a general and indefinite characterization, and leaving to the executive and judicial branches too wide a discretion in its application.” Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296, 308 , 60 S.Ct. 900, 905 , 84 L.Ed. 1213 (1940). The common law of public nuisance may be a perfectly valid method by which to implement a state’s police power in certain defined circumstances where, for example, it is used to restrain that which is prohibited by other constitutionally appropriate standards. It may not be used, however, both to define the standards of protected speech and to serve as the vehicle for its restraint. [Id at 88.]”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[T]he Memoirs plurality required that to prove obscenity it must be affirmatively established that the material is “utterly without redeeming social value.” Thus, even as they repeated the words of Roth , the Memoirs plurality produced a drastically altered test that called on the prosecution to prove a negative, i.e., that the material was “utterly without redeeming social value” — a burden virtually impossible to discharge under our criminal standards of proof.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[I]t is clear that if material is “utterly without redeeming social value” it must certainly lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” so that requirement ... of the Miller standard is met.”
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.