Sands v. Manistee River Improvement Co.’s Empirical Analysis
123 U.S. 288 · 1887
Citation profile
9 federal appellate · 16 district · 46 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 139 later decisions (31 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 2019 · most notably Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen (1917), Simpson v. Shepard (1913)
9 federal appellate · 16 district · 46 state decisions — followed in 22 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedHuse v. Glover
Relationships
Relies on Munn v. Illinois · Davidson v. New Orleans · Hagar v. · County of Mobile v. Kimball · John Pollard et al. v. John Hagan et al.
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 139 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“There is no analogy between the imposition of taxes and the levying of tolls for improvement of highways; and any attempt to justify or condemn proceedings in the one case, by reference to those in the other, must be misleading. Taxes are levied for the support of government, and their amount is regulated by its necessities. Tolls are the compensation for the use of another's property, or of improvements made by him; and their amount is determined by the cost of the property, or of the improvements, and considerations of the return which such values or expenditures should yield.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““There was no contract in the fourth article of the ordinance of 1787 respecting the freedom of the navigable waters of the territory northwest of the Ohio river emptying into the St. Lawrence, which bound the people of the territory, or of any portion of it, when subsequently formed into a state and admitted into the Union. “The ordinance of 1787 was passed a year and some months before the Constitution of the United States went into operation. Its framers, and the Congress of the confederation which passed it, evidently considered that the principles and declaration of rights and privileges expressed in its articles would always be of binding obligation upon the people of the territory. The ordinance in terms ordains and declares that its articles ‘shall be considered as articles of compact between the original states and the people and states in the said territory, and forever remain unalterable unless, by common consent.’ And for many years after the adoption of the Constitution, its provisions were treated by various acts of Congress as in force, except as modified by such acts. In some of the acts organizing portions of the territory under separate territorial governments, it is declared that the rights and privileges granted by the ordinance are secured to the inhabitants of those territories. Yet from the very conditions on which the states formed out of that territory were admitted into the Union, the provisions of the ordinance became inoperative except as adopted b”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The plaintiff in error, the defendant below, misapprehends the purport of the provision that no State shall deprive one of property without due process of law, when he considers the exaction of tolls under a statute for the use of an improved waterway as a deprivation of property within its meaning. There is no taking of property from him by such exaction within the prohibition, any more than there is a taking of property from a traveler, in requiring him to pay for his lodgings in a public inn. There is in such a transaction only an exchange of money for its supposed equivalent. The tolls exacted from the defendant are merely compensation for benefits conferred, by which the floating of his logs down the stream was facilitated.”
2 later decisions 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.