Busell Trimmer Co. v. Stevens’s Empirical Analysis
137 U.S. 423 · 1890
Citation profile
66 federal appellate · 23 district ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 122 later decisions (3 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 1979 · most notably Ansonia Brass & Copper Co. v. Electrical Supply Co. (1892), Allied Wheel Products, Inc. v. Rude (1953)
66 federal appellate · 23 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 Burt v. Evory · Florsheim v. Schilling · Le Roy v. Tatham · Reynolds v. Burns
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 122 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““We repeat that in view of the previous state of the art we think otherwise. The evidence, taken as a whole, shows that all of those claimed elements are to be found in various prior patents—some in one patent, and some in another, but all performing like functions in well-known inventions having the same object as the Orcutt patent, and that there is no substantial difference between the Brown metal cutter and Orcutt’s cutter, except in the configuration of their molded surfaces. That difference, to our minds, is not a patentable difference, even though the one cutter was used in the metal art, and the other in the leather art. A combination of old elements, such as are found in the patented device in suit, does not constitute a patentable invention.””
1 later decision 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.