In re Collins’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 federal appellate · 1 district ·

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 6 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““That the debtor must have known the representations to be false, or at least that he did not know them to be true, in order to prevent his discharge under the present bankruptcy act, is also the conclusion reached by the author of Collier on Bankruptcy (6th Ed.) p. 198. Any other conclusion would result in many instances in preventing a discharge of a worthy bankrupt, whose business was too large to permit him to attend to all the details thereof, including the keeping of the books. A man conducting a large mercantile business, employing a bookkeeper for the purpose of attending to the books, he attending to other branches of the business, has the right to rely on a statement prepared -from the books; and if, relying upon such a statement, he acts upon it in good faith, he is not guilty of such recklessness as amounts to fraud in the eyes of the law, or as should prevent his discharge. How many merchants can tell their liabilities, or even their assets, except by reference to their books? If, as happened in this case, the bookkeeper by reason of illness had to absent himself from business, and during that time some bills which arrived had not been entered, which fact is unknown to the merchant himself, shall it be said that a statement prepared in good faith from these books, if by reason of the illness, or even neglect, of the bookkeeper some liability was left off, thereby making the statement materially false, should be sufficient to brand a man as guilty of a fraud? Such”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. In re Gilpin