Benedict v. Holmes’s Empirical Analysis
1900
Citation profile
27 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 27 later decisions — most recently October 1983 · most notably Tanner v. Tanner (1956), Gosserand v. Monteleone (1925)
27 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 27 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“* * * The wife has a recognized legal right to institute against her husband a suit for divorce or separation of property upon grounds that are specified in the law; but, if she cannot charge her attorney's fees and cost against the assets of the community in the event she obtains a decree of separation and dissolution, the right is practically a barren one, if she possesses no separate property. If the husband's course of conduct be such as to justify the dissolution of the marriage and the dissolution of the community on the petition of the wife, it would seem that in such case the cost and attorney's fees incident thereto ought to go against the community assets in the course of its liquidation, or against the husband personally if he takes the same to himself. * * *”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““In our opinion, the fees of the attorney of the wife who has successfully prosecuted against her husband a suit for separation from bed and board, and a separation of property has a right of action against the latter as head and master of the community for the payment of his fee, as it constitutes a charge against the community, and is payable from its assets.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““We considered the fact of the continued existence of the community as conclusive against the assertion of the wife’s right in her own name; but we did not hold, or intend to decide, that the wife’s attorneys did not have a right of action against the husband, as head and master of the community, upon a quantum meruit, if not on a contract.””
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.