Wright v. McCoy’s Empirical Analysis
1939
Citation profile
13 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently November 1960
13 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 Southland-Greyhound Lines, Inc. v. Richardson · Thurman v. Chandler · Texas Co. v. Betterton · Allen v. Denk · Dunn v. Texas Coca-Cola Bottling Co.
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 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Did the speed of Wright’s truck cause the injury? We may begin with that inquiry since technical proximate cause includes simple cause. Therefore, if the speed of the truck was not a cause of the collision, then such speed, if negligence, was not a proximate cause of the injuries resulting from the collision. Under the jury’s finding that McCoy’s driver was driving the truck on his left-hand side of the highway, supplemented by the undisputed evidence, we are unable to see that the speed of Wright’s truck was a cause of the collision. There was no evidence to support the conclusion, or inference, that if Wright’s truck had been traveling 24 miles an hour, or 5 miles an hour, or even had it been standing still in the place of the collision, such collision would not have happened. It is equally apparent that but for the negligence of McCoy’s driver there is no evidence to support a conclusion or warrant an inference that if Wright’s truck had been going 60 miles an hour the collision could have occurred as a result of such speed. The speed of Wright’s truck could not have been a cause of the collision, except only in some such sense as that if his truck had not been on the highway at all the collision would not have occurred. That is not believed to be within the common and ordinary meaning of the word ‘cause.’ ””
2 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.