Cohen v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
67 F.2d 449 · 1933
Citation profile
10 federal appellate ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently November 1961
10 federal appellate ·
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 Crumpton v. United States · Arine v. United States · Frieden v. United States · Kelly v. United States · Paszkiewicz v. United States
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 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The defendants contend that the evidence of the government at best went merely to show an unexplained shortage of merchandise, and was insufficient to take the case to the jury since it did not exclude every reasonable hypothesis except that of guilt; and, secondly, that even if the evidence unexplained was substantial, nevertheless a verdict should have been directed for the defendants after the uncontradicted explanations of the bookkeeper had been received. “We do not think that these arguments should prevail. The unexplained shrinkage was without doubt the heart of the government’s case in chief, and wherever such a circumstance is disclosed, the seeming failure of a bankrupt to surrender all of his property for the benefit of the creditors very reasonably gives rise to the inference that he is endeavoring fraudulently to save something from the wreck of his business for his own benefit at the expense of those to whom it rightfully belongs. In this case there were also other circumstances by which that inference was supported. The failure to keep, or at least to produce, adequate books of account in a business of considerable volume and complexity from which the history of the business could have been easily ascertained was highly significant. Then, too, the purchase of large amounts of merchandise during the four months immediately preceding bankruptcy, while the business, according to the bookkeeper’s testimony, was steadily growing worse; the age of the goods found by”
1 later decision 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.