126 Cal. App. 2d 279 - Shell v. Schmidt’s Empirical Analysis
1954
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 1 district · 76 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 98 later decisions — most recently February 2016 · most notably 5 Cal. 4th 1082 - Mirkin v. Wasserman (1993), 11 Cal. 3d 394 - Martinez v. Socoma Companies, Inc. (1974)
4 federal appellate · 1 district · 76 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 20 Cal. 2d 713 - Wennerholm v. Stanford University School of Medicine · 27 Cal. 2d 349 - Herzog v. Capital Co. · 80 F. Supp. 876 - Adams v. Albany · 5 Cal. 2d 745 - Garratt v. Baker · 99 Cal. App. 456 - Woodhead Lumber Co. v. E. G. Niemann Investments, Inc.
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 98 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"* * * Of course, the beneficiary must be more than incidentally benefited by the contract. An incidental beneficiary cannot successfully maintain an action. (Citations) Whether the beneficiary is or is not an incidental one, or a beneficiary for whose express benefit the contract was entered into, is a question of construction. (Citation) It is not required that the third party beneficiary be specifically named as a beneficiary. All that section 1559 requires is that the contract be `made expressly for the benefit of a third person', and `expressly' simply means `in an express manner; in direct or unmistakable terms; explicitly; definitely; directly.' (Citation)."”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“‘1 Thus the jury was told, if it found both fraud and breach of contract, to bring in separate verdicts after arriving at the total damage and dividing that figure in any way it saw fit. This was error. It resulted in verdicts and judgments that are highly inconsistent and contradictory. If each set of respondents was damaged in the amount of $1.250 by reason of Schmidt’s failure to comply with the plans and specifications, as found by the jury in its verdicts on the first 12 counts, that same set of respondents was damaged in the amount of the same $1,250 because of Schmidt’s breach of his contract to build in accordance with the plans and specifications. Yet the jury by its verdict on the 13th count has fixed this damage at an additional $12,000 for all respondents, or $1.000 for each set of respondents. This was done pursuant to erroneous instructions that it was permissible to thus split the total damages. Conceivably, the error would not have been prejudicial if both theories found by the jury were sustainable by the record. But, where, as here, nine of the separate verdicts are not sustainable, and the sustainable verdict is in a lump sum, it is obvious that this splitting of the damages was prejudicial to appellant as well as to respondents. ’ ’”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.