Donoghue v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1931
Citation profile
13 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently August 2017
13 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 Sterling v. Union Carbide Co. · Jackiewicz v. United Illuminating Co. · Deisen v. Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha Railway Co.
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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[Mortality] tables only give the average of a large number of lives, and in the individual case the expectancy may be higher or lower than the average. While generally held admissible, they are not conclusive, nor are they the exclusive evidence admissible in proof of that fact, which the jury may determine from other evidence ....”
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.