State v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

14 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 15 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The line between the duties of a court and jury in the trial of causes at law, both civil and criminal, is perfectly well defined; and the rigid observance of it is of the last importance to the administration of systematic justice. Whilst, on the one hand, the jury are the sole ultimate judges of the facts, they are, on the other, to receive the law applicable to the case before them solely from the publicly given instructions of the court. In this way court and jury are made responsible, each in its appropriate department, for the part taken by each in the trial and decision of causes, and in this way alone can errors of fact and errors of law be traced, for the purpose of correction, to their proper sources. If the jury can receive the law of a case on trial in any other mode than from the instructions of the court given in the presence of parties and counsel, how are their errors of law, with any certainty, to be detected, and how, with any certainty, therefore, to be corrected % It is a statute right of parties here, following, too, the ancient course of the common law, to have the law given by the court, in their presence, to the jury, to guide their decision, in order that every error in matter of law may be known' and corrected.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Sparf v. United States