Francis v. Flinn’s Empirical Analysis
118 U.S. 385 · 1886
Citation profile
22 federal appellate · 12 district · 20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 87 later decisions (11 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2017 · most notably Matthews v. Rodgers (1932), Donnelly v. United States (1913)
22 federal appellate · 12 district · 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.
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 87 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““If the publications in the newspapers are false and injurious, he can prosecute the publishers for libel. If a court of equity could interfere and use its remedy of injunction in such cases, it would draw to itself the greater part of the litigation properly belonging to courts of law.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The whole gist of the complaint is that the defendants do not treat the plaintiff as having a right to use his vessel as a pilot-boat, and have publicly so stated, and that some of the parties mentioned have been subjected to suits for their acts in piloting. But if this be so, the plaintiff has a full remedy for his alleged wrongs in the courts of law. They furnish no ground for the interposition of a court of equity.”
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.