Cabell v. Markham’s Empirical Analysis
148 F.2d 737 · 1945
Citation profile
170 federal appellate · 9 district · 121 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 432 later decisions (11 by the Supreme Court) — most recently November 2024 · most notably Chapman v. United States (1991), Watt v. Alaska (1981)
170 federal appellate · 9 district · 121 state decisions — followed in 31 states
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.
Appellate journey
Relationships
Relies on United States v. American Trucking Associations · Sorrells v. United States · Rector Etc of Holy Trinity Church v. United States · United States v. Hutcheson · Keifer v. Reconstruction Finance Corp.
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 432 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Of course it is true that the words used, even in their literal sense, are the primary, and ordinarily the most reliable, source of interpreting the meaning of any writing: be it a statute, a contract, or anything else. But it is one of the surest indexes of a mature and developed jurisprudence not to make a fortress out of the dictionary; but to remember that statutes always have some purpose or object to accomplish, whose sympathetic and imaginative discovery is the surest guide to their meaning.”
95 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Markham v. Cabell · Watt v. Alaska“nor shall a debt be alloioed under this section unless notice of the claim has been filed, or application therefor has been made, prior to the date of the enactment of the Settlement of War Claims Act of 1928.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Markham v. Cabell“nor in any event shall a debt be allowed under this section unless it was owing to and owned by the claimant prior to October 6, 1917.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Markham v. Cabell
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.