Watts v. Sweeney’s Empirical Analysis
1891
Citation profile
84 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 85 later decisions — most recently May 2005 · most notably Western Union Telegraph Co. v. State ex rel. Hammond Elevator Co. (1905), Eel River Railroad v. State ex rel. Kistler (1900)
84 state decisions — followed in 15 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.
Relationships
Relies on Hammond v. Danielson · Brink v. Reid · Scott v. . Delahunt
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 85 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Under such circumstances the necessary implication was, and the fair presumption is, that the engine thus mortgaged, but retained by the mortgagor, to be used by him in earning money to pay the mortgage debt, was to be kept in repair; and the further, presumption follows that it being machinery requiring skilled mechanics and machinists to repair, it would be intrusted to machinists to make necessary repairs, and such being the understanding of the parties to the mortgage, as fairly inferred from the nature of the machinery and use to be made of it, and by permitting it to be retained and used by the mortgagor long after the mortgage debt matured and the conditions of the mortgage forfeited, the mortgagee was bound to know that such mechanic or machinist would have a lien for the amount of the repairs.””
3 later decisions 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.