116 Cal. App. 2d 310 - Ellis v. D'Angelo’s Empirical Analysis
1953
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 100 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 103 later decisions — most recently December 2009 · most notably 17 Cal. 3d 425 - Tarasoff v. Regents of University of California (1976), 69 Cal. 2d 782 - Johnson v. State of California (1968)
3 federal appellate · 100 state decisions — followed in 18 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 23 Cal. 2d 288 - Crane v. Smith · 9 Cal. 2d 226 - Weber v. Pinyan · Buelke v. Levenstadt · Condel v. Savo · 61 Cal. App. 102 - Rocca v. Steinmetz
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 103 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““ * * * as between a battery and negligent injury an infant may have the capacity to intend the violent contact which is essential to the commission of battery when the same infant would be incapable of realizing that his heedless conduct might foreseeably lead to injury to another which is the essential capacity of mind to create liability for negligence.””
3 later decisions quote this exact passage““So far as the count charging the infant defendant with negligence is concerned the question presented to the court is whether as a matter of common knowledge we can say that a child 4 years of age lacks the mental capacity to realize that his conduct which is not intended to bring harm to another may nevertheless be reasonably expected to bring about that result. In the absence of compelling judicial authority to the contrary in the courts of this state we are satisfied that a 4-year-old child does not possess this mental capacity. In the case of Crane v. Smith, 23 Cal.2d 288, 301 [ 144 P.2d 356 ], the court said of a 3-year-old child: ‘And since Janice was too young to be guilty of contributory negligence, the appellant’s liability to her is established. ’ In support of this holding the court cited Gonzales v. Davis, 197 Cal. 256 [ 240 P. 16 ], which involved a 5-year-old child. “No purpose will be served by reviewing all the authorities. None has been found in this state which we feel compels us to hold that a 4-year-old has the mental capacity for negligent conduct. It is stated in a note collecting the cases from other jurisdictions in 107 American Law Reports 102 et seq.: ‘In a majority of the eases it seems that the courts have regarded a child between the ages of 4 and 5 years as incapable of personal negligence, the rule of conclusive incapacity applying to a child of such an age.’ (See further cases collected in the supplement to this note in 174 A.L.R. 1119 .) We a”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““This section [section 41, Civil Code] is based upon sections 23 and 24 of the Field Commission’s draft of a Civil Code which was submitted to the New York Legislature in 1865. This may be an anachronistic vestige of earlier common law principles, in other fields now outmoded, of liability without fault for trespass vi et armis (see Bohlen, Liability In Tort Of Infants And Insane Persons, 23 Mich.L.Rev. 9) but it remains true that our Legislature in Civil Code, section 41, above quoted by providing that a minor or person of unsound mind is civilly liable for wrongs done by him, and particularly by the qualification that he shall not be held for exemplary damages unless he was capable of lmowing that the act was wrongful, has indicated clearly that it intended that a minor or person of unsound mind should be liable in compensatory damages for his tortious conduct even though he was not capable of knowing the wrongful character of his act at the time that he committed it. Startling as this idea may be at first blush, we are bound by this legislative declaration and taking it, and the state of the common law with relation to the liability of infants and persons of unsound mind of which it was intended as a codification, it is our duty to determine the legislative intent and to enforce it. “It is generally stated in 27 American Jurisprudence, Infants, section 90, pages 812-813: ‘Liability of an infant in a civil action for his torts is imposed as a mode, not of punishment, but of”
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.