Commonwealth v. Rodriquez’s Empirical Analysis
1992
Citation profile
84 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 84 later decisions — most recently March 2025 · most notably Commonwealth v. White (1995), Commonwealth v. Edmiston (1993)
84 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 Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Terry v. Ohio · United States v. Cortez · United States v. Sokolow · Dunaway v. New York
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 84 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he seriousness of the criminal activity under investigation, whether it is the sale of drugs or the commission of a violent crime, can never be used as justification for ignoring or abandoning the constitutional rights of every individual in this Commonwealth to be free from intrusions upon his or her personal liberty absent probable cause.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[a]ny act that indicates an intention to take the person into custody and subjects him to the actual control and will of the person making the arrest.... The test is an objective one, i.e., viewed in the light of the reasonable impression conveyed to the person subjected to the seizure rather than the strictly subjective view of the officers or the persons being seized.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Even if probable cause to arrest is absent, the police officer may still legitimately seize a person, and conduct a limited search of the individual’s outer clothing in an attempt to discover the presence of weapons which might be used to endanger the safety of the police officer and others, if the police officer observes unusual and suspicious conduct on the part of the individual seized which leads him reasonably to conclude that criminal activity may be afoot and that the person with whom he is dealing may be armed and dangerous.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.