McCutcheon v. State Building Authority’s Empirical Analysis
1953
Citation profile
57 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 57 later decisions — most recently June 2015 · most notably New Jersey Sports & Exposition Authority v. McCrane (1972), A.Y. McDonald Industries, Inc. v. Insurance Co. of North America (1991)
57 state decisions — followed in 13 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 Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority · City of Walla Walla v. Walla Walla Water Co · Missouri Kansas Texas Railway Company of Texas v. Clay May · Klein v. Board of Tax Supervisors · Tranter v. Alleghency County Co. Authority
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 57 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"* * * While in form a way of providing the State with leasehold interests in building facilities for public use, in reality the design of the act is to enable the State by contracts of purchase to acquire for state use buildings possessed and constructed by the Authority by means of bond issues sustained by the State's promise to supply in the guise of rentals sufficient money to liquidate the bonds, available only through the medium of annual appropriations. * * * The legislation proceeds upon the hypothesis that the fulfillment of the project will not burden the State with a debt or liability within the constitutional sense. But in this the accent is on the external appearance rather than the substance. The label is unimportant; it is not the form but the essence that controls. It is an obvious truism that constitutional limitations may not be set at naught by indirection. * * * * * * "Thus, the Authority is constituted an instrumentality of the State designed to authorize the construction of building facilities for the use of the State that, if accomplished by the State directly, would be ineffectual as in excess of the constitutional debt limit, absent the referendum approval of the electorate in consonance with the debt-limitation provision. Such is indubitably the nature of the projects undertaken by the resolution of the Authority now under review a contrivance to accomplish that which by the same means the State could not do directly. * * * * * * "* * * While the p”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“"And the Maine Supreme Court invoked the same principle under somewhat similar circumstances. The holding there was that the `so-called lease is not in legal effect a lease, it is a contract of purchase'; the `total amount of so-called rental is the purchase price the State is to pay for the property', and "`When paid in full it will liquidate the entire indebtedness of the Building Authority. Being a contract of purchase, obligating the State to pay the purchase price, unless the entire amount thereof is to be paid pursuant to an appropriation presently made from funds or revenues currently available therefor, such contract of purchase would in the constitutional sense be a liability created by the Legislature on behalf of the State. It would constitute a liability which would have to be included with the existing debts and liabilities of the State in determining whether or not they exceed the $2,000,000 limit set forth in Section 14 of Article IX of the Constitution. If such contract price in and of itself, or together with the existing debts and liabilities of the State, should exceed the constitutional debt limit, the so-called lease would be void. A contract which obligates the State to pay money over a period of years for the purchase of property, creates a liability. It makes no difference whether you call the payments the State is obligated to make rental or installments on the purchase price, the legal effect is the same. If you vitiate the provision for the so-calle”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“"* * * The fact that the proposed plan might be termed an evasion of the Constitution would not condemn it unless such evasion was illegal. `It is never an illegal evasion to accomplish a desired result, lawful in itself, by discovering a legal way to do it.' Tranter v. Allegheny County Authority, supra, 316 Pa. 65 , at page 84, 173 A. 289, 297 . The bonds of the Authority are to be paid out of its revenues. The credit of the State is not pledged or bargained away."”
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.