Butler v. Steckel’s Empirical Analysis
137 U.S. 21 · 1890
Citation profile
12 federal appellate · 7 district ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 30 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 1936 · most notably Premier Machine Co. v. Freeman (1936), Gladding-McBean Corp. v. N. Clark & Sons (1926)
12 federal appellate · 7 district ·
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 Smith v. Nichols · Dunbar v. Myers · Clark Pomace-Holder Co v. Ferguson · Watson v. Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis & Chicago Railway Co.
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 30 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““It is true, I doubt not, that it required considerable mechanical skill to make a die which would cut a bretzel from dough so as to imitate a handmade bretzel, because the hand-made .bretzel is somewhat clumsily shaped, as the parts are bent, twisted, and laid upon each other; and it was undoubtedly a matter requiring some study, effort, and experiment to make the shape of the die correspond to the external formation of the bretzel. This, however, seems to me.not to involve invention, but mere mechanical skill. A cutter might be compelled to experiment some,—that is, cut several dies,—but that is not invention,””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.