Latham’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

15 state decisions

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 15 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““It is only too clear that the enactment of 1917, conferring upon certain adopted children an heritable status, not theretofore possessed by them, disturbed no existing right or obligation. The adoption itself was not thereby changed. No wedlock-born child was deprived of heirship, for he could not be an heir-at-law while his parent was yet living. The adopting father remained free to dispose of his estate by will, or in other manner, so far as children were concerned, if he would. The statute could find application only in intestacy afterward transpiring. Of course the law was intended to be retrospective, in the sense that it applied to adoptions decreed previously, but where an adoptive parent died intestate antecedent to the statute, then that statute was subservient to the other statute which had vested the estate at his death to the exclusion of the adopted child. The rights of descent flow from the legal status of the parties, and where the status is fixed, the law supplies the rules of descent, with reference to the situation as it existed at the death of the decedent.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. In Re Williams