Estes v. Merrill’s Empirical Analysis
1915
Citation profile
35 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 39 later decisions — most recently May 1996 · most notably Walker v. Matthews (1941), Lathan v. Lathan (1928)
35 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 Schmisseur v. Beatrie · Evatt v. Miller · Spalding v. Bank of Muskingum · Darling v. Dent · Halbrook v. State
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 39 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““¡So strong is the presumption and the law is so positive in requiring the party who asserts the illegality of a marriage to take the burden of proving it, that such requirement obtains, even though it involves the proving of la negative, and although it is shown.that one of the parties had contracted a previous marriage, and the existence of the wife or husband of the former marriage at the time of the second marriage is established by proof, it is not (Sufficient to overcome the presumption of the validity of the second marriage, the law presuming rather that the first marriage has been dissolved by divorce, in order to sustain the second marriage.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Lathan v. Lathan
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.