Brown v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1977
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 28 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 30 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2019 · most notably Evitts v. Lucey (1985), Whorton v. Commonwealth (1978)
1 federal appellate · 28 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 Spencer v. State of Texas a Bell · Dawson v. Cowan · Thomas v. Commonwealth · Murray v. Commonwealth
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 30 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Substantive rights, even of constitutional magnitude, do not transcend procedural rules, because without such rules those rights would smother in chaos and could not survive ... Brown v. Commonwealth, supra.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“are lights and buoys to mark the channels of safe passage and assure an expeditious voyage to the right destination.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““The victim of the crime knew the appellant and had identified him positively and convincingly. It is doubtful that Tandra’s evidence added anything, but even assuming that it did, and assuming for purposes of the argument that it should have been excluded, there can be no reversible error here for the simple reason that there was no objection to it in any form at any time during the trial proceeding.””
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.