Derby v. Thompson’s Empirical Analysis
146 U.S. 476 · 1892
Citation profile
26 federal appellate · 3 district ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 57 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently October 1984 · most notably Kimberly-Clark Corporation v. Johnson & Johnson and Personal Products Company (1984), L. Sonneborn Sons, Inc. v. Coe (1939)
26 federal appellate · 3 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 Chicago & Northwestern Railway Co. v. Osborne · Thompson v. Derby · Hunter v. International Ry. Imp. 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 57 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“* * * Though, he [the alleged inventor] may not in fact have Known of these three chairs, but may have supposed that he was inventing something valuable, we are bound, in passing upon his device, to assume that he had them all before him, and with that knowledge it seems to us that it required nothing more than the skill of an ordinary mechanic to adopt the most valuable features of each in the construction of a new chair. * * *”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Lettelier v. Mann · In re Stovall
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.