Westfall v. Ellis’s Empirical Analysis
1919
Citation profile
8 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently June 1958
8 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
Relies on Schwab v. Baremore · Beckwith v. Sheldon · Wolfe v. Parham · Fitzhugh v. Harrison · Little v. Rees
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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““It is a general rule that, where a promise is in the alternative to do one or the other of certain things, the promisor ordinarily has the right to elect which one of the alleged promises he will perform, but, if he disables himself from performing one of the alternatives, the other becomes a fixed obligation. In considering a case similar to the one before us, this court said: ‘This amount he had the option, under the contract, to discharge in land or money. He did not exercise his option to discharge the liability in land, hence it became a money demand.’ ””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Meiners v. Kennedy
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.