Bales v. Elder’s Empirical Analysis
1887
Citation profile
20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions — most recently June 1975
20 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 Miller v. Williams
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 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““ The statute, as we understand it, confers upon illegitimates and their lawful issue, as respects the mother and any maternal ancestor, and any person from whom the mother might have inherited if living, inheritable blood, and as such they have the right of inheritance as fully as legitimate children. There is nothing in the statute that will allow an illegitimate to inherit from the father of such person, but the object of the framers of the statute seems to have been to remove the common law disability of inheritance through the maternal line, and, in that regard, place such persons upon the same footing as legitimate persons.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.