Dolbear v. American Bell Tel Molecular Tel Co’s Empirical Analysis
Citation profile
5 federal appellate · 8 district · 10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 68 later decisions (5 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 2019 · most notably Sloan Shipyards Corporation v. United States Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation (1922), United States v. American Bell Telephone Co. (1888)
5 federal appellate · 8 district · 10 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 Loom Company v. Higgins · Atlantio Works v. Brady Brady · Tilghman v. Proctor · O'Reilly v. Morse · Cochrane v. Deener
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 68 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The law does not require that a discoverer or inventor, in order to get a patent for a process, must have succeeded in bringing his art to the highest degree of perfection. It is enough if he describes his method with sufficient clearness and precision to enable those skilled in the matter to understand what the process is, and if he points out some practical way of putting it into operation.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage““It is only necessary to say that he copied Reis, and it was not until after Bell's success that he found out how to use a Reis instrument so as to make it transmit speech. Bell taught him what to do to accomplish that purpose.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage“not for the magnet, but for the telephone of which it forms but part.”
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.