Osborn v. Clark’s Empirical Analysis
1881
Citation profile
5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently December 1994
5 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.
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 5 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The writ of mandate lies to compel an inferior court, board, tribunal, or officer to act, but never to command how to act, unless the act be purely ministerial. If the act sought for be judicial or discretionary in its character, no court by its writ of mandate can command what this action shall be, much less can it command how and what the said action shall be after he or it has already fully acted upon the matter, no matter how erroneously.”
2 later decisions 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.