Ball v. Langles’s Empirical Analysis
102 U.S. 128 · 1880
Citation profile
2 federal appellate ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions (9 by the Supreme Court) — most recently May 1952
2 federal appellate ·
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 Seymour v. Osborne · Russell v. Dodge
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 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““When the reissues of 186Í) and 1870 were granted, the commissioner of patents had authority under the acts of congress to grant reissues only in certain specified cases. These were whenever a patent was inoperative or invalid by reason of a defective or insufficient specification, or by reason of the patentee claiming as his own invention or discovery more than he had a right to claim as new, if the error had arisen by inadvertence, accident, or mistake, without any fraudulent or deceptive Intention. The commissioner was invested with authority to determine whether the surrendered patent was invalid by reason of a defective or insufficient specification, or because the patentee had claimed more than he had a right to claim as new, and, if he found such to be the case, and found, also, that an error had been due to inadvertence, accident, or mistake without fraud, his decision was conclusive, and not subject to review by the courts. But the law did not confer upon him jurisdiction to grant a reissue embracing new matter or a broader invention than what was revealed by the original specifications or drawings or models, except in some cases, where there was neither model nor drawing. A reissue for anything more is therefore inoperative and void. Accordingly this court has repeatedly held that if on comparing- the reissue with its original the former appears on its face to be for a different invention than that described or indicated in the latter it must be declared invalid.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.