State v. Thornton’s Empirical Analysis
1904
Citation profile
11 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently March 2017
11 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.
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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The teacher has the power to enforce obedience to the rules and to his commands. One of the means recognized by the law is corporal chastisement. He may thereby inflict temporary pain, but not seriously endanger life, limb, or health, or disfigure the child, or cause any other permanent injury. He cannot lawfully beat the child, even moderately, to gratify his own evil passions; the chastisement must be honestly inflicted in punishment for some dereliction which the pupil understands. Plainly, if the teacher keeps himself within these limits and his lawful jurisdiction, he must decide the question of the expediency or necessity of the punishment and its degree; it is impossible he should inflict it without.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Drum v. . Miller“[A parent] cannot be made penally responsible for error of judgment, but only for wickedness of purpose.”
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.