Welch v. Wilcox’s Empirical Analysis
1869
Citation profile
16 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently October 2000
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.
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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“When the way is defined as in the case at bar, the construction we give is ... “necessary to the security of both parties. To the grantee, to insure him a way of known width and dimension, the sufficiency of which he may judge of before he closes his contract for the purchase; and to the grantor, to secure himself against the claim of the grantee to an indefinite right to pass over his premises.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Skow v. Goforth
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.