Kennon v. Gilmer’s Empirical Analysis
131 U.S. 22 · 1889
Citation profile
189 federal appellate · 19 district · 119 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 432 later decisions (23 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2021 · most notably Dimick v. Schiedt (1935), Stroud v. United States (1919)
189 federal appellate · 19 district · 119 state decisions — followed in 26 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 Arkansas Val Land Cattle Co v. Mann · Railroad Company v. Barron · Webster v. Reid · Railway Company v. Heck
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 432 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[I]n a case in which damages for a tort have been assessed by a jury at an entire sum, no court of law, upon a motion for a new trial for excessive damages and for insufficiency of the evidence to support the verdict, is authorized, according to its own estimate of the amount of damages which the plaintiff ought to have recovered, to enter an absolute judgment for any other sum than that assessed by the jury.”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage“■'The defendants objected to this instruction that the jury were permitted to assess damages for mental suffering. But the instruction given only authorized them in assessing damages for the injury caused by the defendants to rhe plaintiff to take into consideration his hodily and mental pain and suffering, both taken together (but not his mental pain alone), and such as inevitably and necessarily resulted from the original injury. The action is for an injury to an intelligent being, and. when the injury whether caused by willfulness or negligence produces mental as well as bodily anguish and suffering independent of any extraneous consideration or cause, it is impossible to exclude the mental suffering in estimating the extent of the personal injury for which compensation is to be awarded.””
5 later decisions quote this exact passage“[The appellate court is] at liberty, in disposing of the motion for a new trial according to its view of the evidence, either to deny or to grant a new trial generally, or to order judgment for a less sum than the amount of the verdict, conditional upon a remittitur by the plaintiff.”
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.