Diamond v. Diamond’s Empirical Analysis
1998
Citation profile
16 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 17 later decisions — most recently May 2025
16 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 Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp. · Bloom v. Illinois · Hicks Ex Rel. Feiock v. Feiock · Poola v. UNEMP. COMP. BD. OF REVIEW · Bell v. Beneficial Consumer Discount Co.
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 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The distinction between criminal and civil contempt is ... a distinction between two permissible responses to contumacious behavior. These judicial responses are classified according to the dominant purpose of the court. If the dominant purpose is to prospectively coerce the contemnor to comply with an order of the court, the adjudication is civil. If, however, the dominant purpose is to punish the contemnor for disobedience of the court’s order or some other contemptuous act, the adjudication of contempt is criminal. [The] dominant purpose of coercion or punishment is expressed in the sanction imposed. A civil adjudication of contempt coerces with a conditional or indeterminate sentence of which the contem-nor may relieve himself by obeying the court’s order, while a criminal adjudication of contempt punishes with a certain term of imprisonment or a fine which the contemnor is powerless to escape by compliance.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Garr v. Peters · In Re Lincoln“(1) the order must be definite, clear, specific and leave no doubt or uncertainty in the mind of the person to whom it was addressed of the conduct prohibited; (2) the contemnor must have had notice of the specific order or decree, (3) the act constituting the violation must have been volitional, and (4) the contemnor must have acted with wrongful intent.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“in order to avoid ... a delay in the disposition of the underlying case, we recommend that, when considering the use of criminal contempt, a trial judge assign a separate case number to the criminal matter so that [the PFA] can proceed of its own accord. Then the underlying action will not be affected by the taking of an appeal from any order entered in that separate action.”
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.