The Main v. Williams’s Empirical Analysis
152 U.S. 122 · 1894
Citation profile
78 federal appellate · 54 district · 3 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 242 later decisions (29 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2018 · most notably Lauritzen v. Larsen (1953), Lewis v. Lewis & Clark Marine, Inc. (2001)
78 federal appellate · 54 district · 3 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 Place v. Norwich & New York Transportation Co. · The New Jersey Steam Navigation Company v. The Merchants' Bank of Boston · Dyer v. National Steam Navigation Co. · The Great Western
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 242 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The liability of the owner of any vessel, whether American or foreign, for any embezzlement, loss, or destruction by any person of any property, goods, or merchandise shipped or put on board of such vessel, or for any loss, damage, or injury by collision, or for any act, matter, or thing, loss, damage, or forfeiture, done, occasioned, or incurred, without the privity or knowledge of such owner or owners, shall not, except in the cases provided for in subsection (b) of this section, exceed the amount or value of the interest of such owner in such vessel, and her freight then pending.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““The real object of the act in question was to limit the liability of vessel owners ,to their interest in the adventure; hence, in assessing the value of the ship, the custom has been to include all that belongs to the ship, and may be presumed to be the property of the owner — not merely the hull, together with the boats, tackle, apparel, and furniture, but all the appurtenances, comprising whatever is on board for the object of the voyage, belonging to the owners, whether such object be warfare, the conveyance of passengers, goods, or the fisheries.””
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““But, however the practice originated, it appears, by the end of the seventeenth century, to have become firmly established among the leading maritime nations of Europe, since the French Ordinance of 1681, which has served as a model for most of the modern maritime codes, declares that the owners of the ship shall be answerable for the acts of the master, but shall be discharged therefrom upon relinquishing the ship and freight. Bk. 2, tit. 8, art. 2. A similar provision in the Ordinance of Rotterdam of 1721 declared that the owners should not be answerable for any act of the master done without their order, any further than their part of the ship amounted to; and by other articles of the same ordinance it was provided that each part owner should be liable for the value of his own share. The French Ordinance of 1681 was carried, with slight change of phraseology, into the commercial code of France, and all the other maritime nations whose jurisprudence is founded upon the civil law. Code de Commerce (French) art. 216; German Mar. Code, art. 452; Code of the Netherlands, art. 321; Belgian Code, art. 216; Italian Code, art. 311; Russian Code, art. 649; Spanish Code, art. 621, 022; Portuguese Code, art. 1345; Brazilian Code, art. 494; Argentine Code, art. 1039; Chilian Code, art. 879.””
2 later decisions 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.