131 W. Va. 562 - State Ex Rel. Dieringer v. Bachman’s Empirical Analysis
1948
Citation profile
20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions — most recently June 2009
20 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 128 W. Va. 456 - State Ex Rel. McLaughlin v. Morris · 123 W. Va. 385 - Ebbert v. Tucker · Groves v. County Court of Grant County · 114 W. Va. 509 - Prichard v. Devan · 122 W. Va. 29 - State Ex Rel. Rickey v. Sims
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 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Special laws are those made for individual cases, or for less than a class requiring laws appropriate to its peculiar condition and circumstances; local laws are laws special as to place. A law is `special' in a constitutional sense when by force of an inherent limitation it arbitrarily separates some persons, places or things from those upon which, but for such separation, it would operate. An arbitrary separation of persons, places or things of the same general class, so that some of them will and others of them will not be affected by the law, is of the essence of special legislation. What constitutes an arbitrary separation depends upon the purpose and subject of the particular act and the circumstances and conditions surrounding its passage. "A law which bears on its face no evidence of an exclusive or discriminative purpose is prima facie valid. The test of a special law is the appropriateness of its provisions to the objects that it excludes. It is not, therefore, what a law includes that makes it special, but what it excludes. If nothing be excluded that should be contained, the law is general * * *.”
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.