Bechtel v. Chase’s Empirical Analysis
1909
Citation profile
28 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 29 later decisions — most recently June 1964 · most notably Philpott v. Superior Court (1934), 35 Cal. 2d 653 - Stanley v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. (1950)
28 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 Spreckels v. Gorrill · Robinson v. Western Pacific Railroad · Hamlin v. Pacific Electric Ry. Co. · Etchas v. Orena · Wendling Lumber Co. v. Glenwood Lumber 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 29 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The plaintiff seeks to bring the case within the rule that where personal property is wrongfully converted, the injured party may ‘waive the tort and sue in assumpsit’. In many jurisdictions this doctrine is limited to cases where the wrongdoer has sold the property or otherwise converted it into money, in which event the plaintiff may maintain an action for the proceeds (4 Cyc. 332). In this state, however, as in a number of others, a broader rule enables one whose goods are wrongfully taken and used by another to sue in assumpsit for their value as for goods sold and delivered. (Roberts v. Evans, 43 Cal. 380 ; Lehmann v. Schmidt, 87 Cal. 15 [25 Pac. 161]; Chittenden v. Pratt, 89 Cal. 178 [ 26 Pac. 626 ].) But the application of this rule, even in its more liberal form, cannot be extended to a case where plaintiff has voluntarily parted with his property in exchange for something received by him in return. The very basis of the ‘waiver of tort’ is that plaintiff consents to the taking of his property and affirms: the act of the wrongdoer. He treats it as a sale, and recovers the value due him under an implied contract of sale. But where he has actually agreed to an exchange, which is executed, his affirmance of the transaction is an affirmance of it as a whole. Having parted with his property for an agreed consideration, he cannot, while relying upon his transfer as one made pursuant to contract, hold the defendant to the payment- of any other consideration than the one agr”
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.