Ellison v. Ellison’s Empirical Analysis
1942
Citation profile
8 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently May 1973
8 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 Cornet v. Cornet · Payne v. Chance · Clopton v. Flowers · Byrd v. Taylor
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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The law favors wills. * * * They will be liberally construed to effectuate the primary and dominant purposes and intentions of the testator. Courts will, if possible, discover the real intention of the testator, from the language used by him in his testamentary document, and give effect to those expressed intentions. The applicable rules of construction are that the instrument as a whole will be considered, rather than isolated clauses, phrases or even paragraphs. * * * If there is no ambiguity in the will, testator’s true intention will be gathered from the instrument alone; if testator’s dominant purpose is made clear by the language used, but the means of accomplishing that end is rendered uncertain and susceptible to more than one meaning, then and only then may the court look to conditions and circumstances surrounding the testator when he expressed his-desires; * *”
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.