Commonwealth v. Lopez’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

8 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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[A]ny question of whether appellant’s trial counsel was actually conflicted must be measured by the governing law as it existed when this matter was tried. As members of the bar, lawyers are obligated to recognize and avoid actual conflicts in the first instance, just as they are obligated not to pursue baseless or frivolous claims.... Appellant’s current counsel is essentially claiming that trial counsel was obliged, at the time of trial, to inform the court that he had a conflict because of the pending disciplinary investigation and to seek to withdraw from representation of appellant. But nothing in the law, either at the time of appellant’s trial or now, remotely suggests that counsel was bound to view his own unrelated personal disciplinary issues, which were evidently public knowledge in the Lehigh County legal community, as creating an actual conflict with his client. In short, appellant proposes a novel and unprincipled expansion of what amounts to “actual conflict.” Even if a court someday were to adopt such an odd rule, however, that new rule could not be used to retroactively condemn trial counsel’s conduct decades ago.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Commonwealth v. King