137 Ill. 2d 222 - Smith v. Eli Lilly & Co.’s Empirical Analysis
1990
Citation profile
26 federal appellate · 6 district · 77 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 157 later decisions — most recently June 2022 · most notably 168 Ill. 2d 83 - Leonardi v. Loyola University of Chicago (1995), 164 Ill. 2d 54 - Adcock v. Brakegate, Ltd. (1994)
26 federal appellate · 6 district · 77 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
Applies 42 U.S.C. § 300A
Relies on Palsgraf v. Long Island R.R. Co. · 32 Ill. 2d 612 - Suvada v. White Motor Co. · 26 Cal. 3d 588 - Sindell v. Abbott Laboratories · 33 Cal. 2d 80 - Summers v. Tice · 117 Ill. 2d 507 - Kirk v. Michael Reese Hospital & Medical Center
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 157 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"Where the conduct of two or more actors is tortious, and it is proved that harm has been caused to the plaintiff by only one of them, but there is uncertainty as to which one has caused it, the burden is upon each actor to prove that he has not caused the harm." (Internal quotation marks omitted.) Id. at 269 , 164 Ill.Dec. 817 , 583 N.E.2d 1139 (quoting Restatement (Second) of Torts § 433B(3) (1965)).”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“"is too great a deviation from a tort principle which we have found to serve a vital function in the law, causation in fact, especially when market share liability is a flawed concept and its application will likely be only to a narrow class of defendants.” Smith, 137 Ill. 2d at 268 .”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent““In res ispa loquitur and alternative liability situations, all parties who could have been the cause of the plaintiff’s injuries are joined as defendants. This helps to preserve the identification element because liability will surely fall on the actual wrongdoer. By contrast, market share liability merely requires the plaintiff to name as defendants either a substantial share of those in the market or, in some theories, only one manufacturer who was in the market. As a result, there is a real possibility that the defendant actually responsible for the injuries is not before the court. Second, in res ipsa loquitur and alternative liability, burden-shifting is considered equitable because defendants are typically in a better position than the plaintiff to determine who caused the harm. Market share liability shifts the burden to defendants without regard to whether plaintiff is better able to identify the defendant responsible or without regard to defendants’ ability to identify who among them is actually responsible. *** Third, in the earlier exceptions the burden is shifted to parties who bear some culpability for causing plaintiff’s injury. In alternative liability, each defendant was at least negligent toward the plaintiff, and in res ipsa loquitur at least one defendant caused the injury and the others are intimately connected to the activity and instrumentality that caused the harm. But with market share liability the named defendant need not have been directly connecte”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.