Commonwealth v. Vasquez’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

13 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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “This Court has differentiated between a `mere encounter' [and] an `investigative detention'. A mere encounter [or request for information] need not be supported by any level of suspicion, but carries no official compulsion to stop or to respond. An investigative detention must be supported by a reasonable suspicion; it subjects a suspect to a stop and a period of detention, but does not involve such coercive conditions as to constitute the functional equivalent of an arrest. [I]n order to determine whether a particular encounter constitutes a seizure, a court must consider all the circumstances surrounding the encounter to determine whether the police conduct could have communicated to a reasonable person that the person was not free to decline the officer's requests or otherwise terminate the encounter.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
   e.g. Commonwealth v. Martin