Commonwealth v. Lovette’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
226 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 236 later decisions — most recently September 2025 · most notably Commonwealth v. Jackson (1984), Commonwealth v. Edmiston (1993)
226 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 · Carroll v. United States · Brinegar v. United States · Beck v. State of Ohio · Adams v. Williams
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 236 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The test for sufficiency of the evidence is whether accepting as true all of the evidence reviewed in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth, together with all reasonable inferences therefrom, the trier of fact could have found that each element of the offenses charged was supported by evidence and inferences sufficient in law to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
11 later decisions quote this exact passage“increased the intrusiveness of the encounter”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage“[I]t is clear that the placing of appellant and his companions in the police vehicle for the purpose of transporting them to the scene of the offense, without their consent, constituted an arrest as that term has been defined under our cases. It is equally true that police action was a seizure of the person within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment of the federal constitution.”
3 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.