Cotton v. Sharpstein’s Empirical Analysis
1861
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 1 district · 7 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently July 2019
1 federal appellate · 1 district · 7 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 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The only difficulty growing out of the nature of money is, as some of the cases have said, a difficulty of fact and not of law. In law, the rights of the parties in respect to the money are the same as in respect to any other property. The only difference is, that the identity of money is more easily destroyed than that of other property, and where the agent has so destroyed it, it can no longer be specifically recovered; not because the right no longer exists, but because of the difficulty in fact. But this difficulty does not exist in respect to the question of the liability of the agent for the conversion. So far as that is concerned, there is no more difficulty in showing its conversion than in showing the conversion of any other property. And that being so, it would follow that the agent should be held liable for converting it upon the same principle that he would be for converting any other.” Cotton v. Sharpstein, 14 Wis. 226 ; note 20 L. R. A. n. s. 35; Meyer v. Doherty, 133 Wis. 398 , 113 N. W. 671 ; Milbrath v. State, 138 Wis. 354 , 120 N. W. 252 ; 26 Ruling Case Law, “Trover,” § 8.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Regas v. Helios“[W]hen [the defendant] so mingles [money] without authority and then refuses to pay, I am unable to see why such refusal should not be just as much evidence of a conversion as though the money were still in a separate parcel.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[A] party, by entering into a contract with the owner in respect to property, does not thereby incapacitate himself from wrongfully invading the rights of the owner which exist independent of the contract.”
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.