163 W. Va. 626 - Trail v. Hawley’s Empirical Analysis
1979
Citation profile
19 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 21 later decisions — most recently March 2019
19 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 148 W. Va. 239 - Robertson v. Hatcher · Thompson v. Mann · State ex rel. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad v. Daugherty
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 21 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“While the Uniform Declaratory Judgments Act, W.Va.Code, 55-13-1 et seq. [1941] does not expressly require a justiciable controversy as a condition precedent to its application, we have held that the issue to be determined must be potentially justiciable at some future time when the things sought to be avoided by the declaratory judgment action will have occurred. Robertson v. Hatcher, 148 W.Va. 239 , 135 S.E.2d 675 (1964). Simply stated, for the purposes of a declaratory judgment action, a justiciable controversy exists when a legal right is claimed by one party and denied by another.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage““Heirs, who will be the ultimate beneficiaries of a wrongful death award, may bring a declaratory judgment action against the personal representative of the decedent’s estate to determine if the representative is acting in consonance with his or her fiduciary duty to the heirs when a real controversy over matters relating to the prosecution of a wrongful death action exists.””
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.