Richardson v. Rutherford’s Empirical Analysis
1990
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 6 district · 36 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 48 later decisions — most recently April 2015 · most notably Coates v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (1999), Allsup's Convenience Stores, Inc. v. North River Insurance (1998)
6 federal appellate · 6 district · 36 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.
Relationships
Relies on DataComm Interface v. COMPUTERWORLD, INC. ADELSON · Fishman v. Brooks · State v. Martin · Chavez v. Manville Products Corp. · Nienstedt v. Wetzel
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 48 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]he findings of the jury should not be disturbed as excessive except in extreme cases, as where it results from passion, prejudice, partiality, sympathy, undue influence, or some corrupt cause or motive where palpable error is committed by the jury, or where the jury has mistaken the measure of damages. However, the mere fact that a jury’s award is possibly larger than the court would have given is not sufficient to disturb a verdict.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“an abuse of process arises when there has been a perversion of the court processes to accomplish some end which the process was not intended by law to accomplish, or which compels the party against whom it has been used to perform some collateral act which he legally and regularly would not be compelled to do.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“The existence of this cause of action recognizes that even in meritorious cases the legal process may be abused. That abuse involves using the process to secure a purpose for which it was not intended. We can see no reason why there must be subsequent activity to support the cause of action. Such activity may be very probative in determining the intent to abuse; however, there need not be such a subsequent action to commit the tort. To rule otherwise would protect the tortfeasor when the abuse is most effective — where the issuance of the process alone is sufficient to accomplish the collateral purpose.”
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.