Bedford v. White’s Empirical Analysis
1940
Citation profile
2 district · 34 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 36 later decisions — most recently July 1991 · most notably City of Thornton v. Farmers Reservoir & Irrigation Co. (1978), Police Pension & Relief Board v. McPhail (1959)
2 district · 34 state decisions — followed in 10 states
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 Pennie v. Reis · Pennie v. Res · City of Dallas v. Trammell · United States v. Hall · Eddy v. Morgan
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 36 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““A pension is not a matter of contract, and is not founded upon any legal liability. No man has a legal vested right to a pension; it is a mere bounty or gratuity given by the government in consideration or recognition of meritorious past services .... It may be bestowed upon such persons and upon such terms as the law-making body of the government prescribes. And, ‘its payment must be made and accepted in exact conformity with the terms of the grant, and must be subject to all the limitations, conditions and exceptions therein contained.’ It is, at most, an expectancy granted by the law. . . .””
1 later decision quote this exact passage“That pensions are not granted primarily for the benefit of the recipients thereof, but for the benefit of the state, in other words for the public good, may be admitted. If a pension has no reasonable relation to the public good it is of course a mere private grant and void. But if it serves a present public purpose it is not a mere private grant even though as an incident to the accomplishment of the public purpose the recipients thereof may be personally benefitted.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage““No appropriation shall be made for charitable, industrial, educational or benevolent purposes to any person, corporation or community not under the absolute control of the state, nor to any denominational or sectarian institution or association.””
1 later decision 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.