Pierce v. Drew’s Empirical Analysis
1883
Citation profile
63 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 65 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently April 1984 · most notably Boston Edison Co. v. Board of Selectmen of Concord (1968), United Electric Light Co. v. Deliso Construction Co. (1943)
63 state decisions — followed in 17 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 Pensacola Telegraph Company v. Western Union Telegraph Company · Story v. . New York Elevated R.R. Co. · Williams v. . the New-York Central Railroad Company · Holmes v. Hunt · Connecticut River Railroad v. County Commissioners
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 65 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The discovery of the telegraph developed a new and valuable mode of communicating intelligence. Its use is certainly similar to, if not identical with, that public use of transmitting information for which the highway was originally taken, even if the means adopted are quite different from the post boy or the mail coach. It is a newly discovered method of exercising the old public easement, and all appropriate methods must have been deemed to have been paid for when the road was laid out.”
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.