McSherry v. Block’s Empirical Analysis
880 F.2d 1049 · 1989
Citation profile
40 federal appellate · 1 district · 4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 55 later decisions — most recently June 2018 · most notably Nunez v. City of San Diego (1997), Taylor v. Kincheloe (1990)
40 federal appellate · 1 district · 4 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 In the Matter of Samuel Winship · Broadrick v. Oklahoma · Grayned v. City of Rockford · Connally v. General Construction Co. · Kolender v. Lawson
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 55 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“it fails to give a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice that his contemplated conduct is forbidden by the statute.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Our task is only to decide whether the [state court’s] interpretation of [its] own law is so unexpected, so outlandish, that no reasonable person could have expected it.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[W]e think it significant that the issue of construction involved here is not the drawing of a line between legal conduct and illegal conduct. What Knutson did was unlawful under any interpretation of Iowa law, and he makes no contention to the contrary. His position, reduced to its simplest terms, is that he had a right to expect that he would be convicted for kidnapping only, rather than for kidnapping for ransom. This kind of reliance interest is not, in our view, entitled to a great deal of weight. When a person does an act that he well knows to be a violation of some law, and when a statute is later interpreted to cover his conduct in a way that does not do violence to the ordinary understanding of the English language, the Fourteenth Amendment is not offended.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. State v. Caddy
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.