Commonwealth v. Heinbaugh’s Empirical Analysis
1976
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 192 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 204 later decisions — most recently June 2023 · most notably Commonwealth v. Barud (1996), Commonwealth v. Mikulan (1983)
2 federal appellate · 192 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 Miller v. California · Smith v. Goguen · Colten v. Commonwealth of Kentucky
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 204 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““majority in effect creates a fiction. It discovers a standard which it says renders the current statute legitimate, but the standard is just as vague as the statute. ‘Gross and open indecency’? What. is that? ‘Morals of the community’? Vaguer yet! The result of the majority’s analysis is that a vague statute, one which gives no reasonable notice of the prohibitive conduct, is held constitutional through the application of a vague common law standard, which gave no reasonable notice of the prohibitive conduct.” Commonwealth v. Heinbaugh, 467 Pa. 1, 11 , 354 A.2d 244, 248 (1976) (Manderino, J., dissenting).”
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.