John Butler Levi Reynolds Junior and William Overfield Late Board of Canal Commissioners of Pennsylvanias v. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

20 federal appellate · 12 district · 70 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 178 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““The contracts designed to be protected by the tenth section of the first article of that instrument are contracts by which perfect rights, certain definite, fixed private rights of property, are vested. These are clearly distinguishable from measures or engagements adopted or undertaken by the body politic or state government for the benefit of all, and from the necessity of the case, and according to universal understanding, to be varied or discontinued as the public good shall require. The selection of officers, who are nothing more than agents for the effectuating of such public purposes, is matter of public convenience or necessity, and so, too, are the periods for the appointment of such agents; but neither the one nor the other of these arrangements can constitute any obligation to continue such agents, or to re-appoint them, after the measures which brought them into being shall have been found useless shall have been fulfilled, or shall have been abrogated as even detrimental to the well-being of the public. The promised compensation for services actually performed and accepted, during the continuance of the particular agency, may undoubtedly be claimed, both upon principles of compact and of equity; but to insist beyond this on the perpetuation of a public policy either useless or detrimental, and upon a reward for acts neither desired nor performed, would appear to be reconcilable with neither common justice nor common sense. The establishment of such a principle w”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Maynard v. Hill · Roy v. Jones

2. ““[T]he appointment to and the tenure of an office created for the public use, and the regulation of the salary affixed to such an office, do not fall within the [contract clause] ; do not come within the import of the term ‘contracts,’ or, in other words, the vested, private personal rights thereby intended to be protected. They are functions appropriate to that class of powers and obligations by which governments are enabled, and are called upon, to foster and promote the general good; functions, therefore, which governments cannot be presumed to have surrendered, if indeed they can under any circumstances be justified in surrendering them.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Kingston v. McLaughlin

3. “not be diminished during their continuance in office,”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. State Ex Rel. Albritton v. Lee