Teis v. Smuggler Mining Co.’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

14 federal appellate · 3 district · 3 state decisions

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

1. ““It is liot only requisite that damage, actual or inferential, should be suffered, but tliis damage must be tbe legitimate sequence of the thing amiss. The maxim of the law here applicable is that in law the immediate, and not the remote, cause of any event is regarded; and in the application of it the law rejects, as not constituting the foundation for an action, that damage which does not flow proximately from the act complained of. In other words, the law always refers the injury to the proximate, not the remote, cause. The explanation of this maxim may be given thus: If an injury has resulted in consequence of a certain wrongful act or omission, but only through or by means of some intervening cause, from which last cause the injury followed as a direct and immediate consequence, the law will refer the damage to the last or proximate cause, and refuse to trace it to that which was riiore remote. The chief and sufficient reason for this rule is to be found in the impossibility of tracing consequences through successive steps to the remote cause, and the necessity of pausing in the investigation of the chain of events at the point beyond which experience and observation convince us we cannot press our inquiries with safety. To the proximate cause we may usually trace consequences with some degree of assurance; but beyond that we enter a field of conjecture, where the uncertainty renders the attempt at exact conclusions futile. A writer on this subject has stated the rule in”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Chicago, B. & Q. R. v. Richardson

2. ““The law in its practical administration in cases of this kind regards only proximate or immediate, and not remote, causes, and in ascertaining which is proximate and which remote refuses to indulge in metaphysical niceties. •Where in the sequence of events between the original default and the final mischief an entirely and unrelated cause intervenes, and is of itself sufficient to stand as the cause of the mischief, the second cause is ordinarily regarded as the proximate cause, and the other as the remote cause. This is emphatically true where the intervening cause is the act of some person unrelated to the original actor. * * * If the misconduct is of a character which, according to the usual experience of mankind, is calculated to invite or induce the intervention of some subsequent cause, the intervening cause will not excuse him, and the subsequent mischief will be held to be the result of the original misconduct. This is upon the ground that one is held responsible for all the consequences of his act which are natural and probable, and ought to have been foreseen by a reasonably prudent man.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Jennings v. Davis

3. ““An injury that results from an act of: negligence, but that could not have been foreseen or reasonably anticipated as its probable consequence, and that would not have resulted from it, had not the interposition of some new and independent cause interrupted the natural sequence of events, turned aside their course, and produced it, is not actionable. Such an act of negligence is the remote, and tho independent intervening cause is the proximate, cause of the injury. A natural consequence of an act is tho consequence which ordinarily follows it — the result which may be reasonably anticipated from it. A probable consequence is one that is more likely to follow its supposed cause than it is to fail to follow it” — citing a long line of authorities.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Smith v. Pejepscot Paper Co.