pertinency
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 364 U.S. 372 - McPhaul v. United States · 1960Most cited · 277 citing opinions
congressional subpoena
[T]he records called for by the subpoena were not 'plainly incompetent or irrelevant to any lawful purpose (of the Subcommittee) in the discharge of (its) duties,' but, on the contrary, were reasonably 'relevant to the inquiry.
How often courts cite the cases defining “pertinency”
Court decisions citing the 2 opinions that defined “pertinency” — 392 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 2 definitions, chronological · 1960–1961
two quite different issues regarding pertinency may be involved in a prosecution under 2 U.S.C. § 192. One issue reflects the requirement of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment that the pertinency of the interrogation to the topic under the congressional committee's inquiry must be brought home to the witness at the time the questions are put to him. The other and different pertinency issue stems from the prosecution's duty at the trial to prove that the questions propounded by the congressional committee were in fact 'pertinent to the question under inquiry' by the committee. These two basically different issues must not be blurred by treating them as a single question of 'pertinency.
Congressional contempt