People v. Salomon’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

1 district · 23 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 24 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““The law under which this additional tax was imposed, had passed the legislature under all the forms of the constitution, and had received executive sanction, and became, by its own intrinsic force, the law to you, to every other public officer in the State, and to all the people. You assumed the responsibility of declaring the law unconstitutional, and at once determined to disregard it, to set up your own judgment as superior to the expressed will of the legislature, asserting, in fact, an entire independence thereof. This is the first case in our judicial history, in which a ministerial officer has taken upon himself the responsibility of nullifying an act of the legislature for the better collection of the public revenue — of arresting its operation — of disobeying its behests, and placing his own judgment above legislative authority expressed in the form of law. “To the law every man owes homage, ‘the very least as needing its care, the greatest as not exempted from its power.’ To allow a ministerial officer to decide upon the validity of a law, would be subversive of the great objects and purposes of government, for if one such officer may assume infallibility, all other like officers may do the same, and thus an end be put to civil government, one of whose cardinal principles is, subjection to the laws. “Being a ministerial officer, the path of duty was plain before you. You strayed from it, and became a volunteer in the effort to arrest the law, and it was successful.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. State v. Wiley