110 Ind. App. 52 - Schilling v. Parsons, Administrator’s Empirical Analysis
1941
Citation profile
11 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently April 1975
11 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 Teter v. Teter · Taylor v. Canaday · Bartholomew v. Pierson · Walker v. Towle · 97 Ind. App. 592 - Humphrey v. Pleasure Park Company
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 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““A contract by words in the present tense, or per verba de praesenti as the books express it, to be married or to be husband and wife, to comply with the well settled law on the subject must, of necessity, be an express contract, although it need not be in writing, and need not be in any particular words. In cannot be an implied contract, such as the law raises in the case of quasi contracts or in actions of assumpsit. An express contract can only be created by an offer and acceptance. There must be words to create an offer although the acceptance can be made by either words or acts, according to the terms of the offer . .. Cohabitation, reputation or other conduct may corroborate evidence that there was a contract, or in the absence of testimony by one of the parties as to what the agreement was, if any, it might, in a strong case, be sufficient to draw the inference that there was a contract to marry in the present tense, but the contract must be formed by what was said and done by the parties, and when the testimony of the party asserting and relying upon the contract discloses there was no language in the present tense constituting a contract to marry, then cohabitation, reputation and other conduct cannot constitute words which were never spoken or used. “Even where there is evidence of an oral contract not witnessed, our courts have made additional requirements to establish the validity of a common-law marriage. ‘But where the contract between the parties is oral but no”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““To hold that a common-law marriage is established without public acknowledgment of the marriage status of the contracting parties where there is an unwitnessed oral agreement, would open the door to perjury and fraud; deny to the parties themselves the protection to which they are each entitled, and jeopardize the sanctity of the basic institution of all civilized society, the home.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““While common-law marriages are in derogation of our statutes, still such marriages are recognized as valid and binding where made between parties of contracting capacity by their mutual assent, followed by cohabitation as husband and wife, together with such other circumstances as are essential to the establishment of such a marriage.””
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.