Waldron v. . Willard’s Empirical Analysis
1858
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 15 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 1941
1 federal appellate · 10 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.
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 15 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Courts are not required to confine themselves to the exact signification of the terms found in the contract, when it is plain, from the situation of the parties at the time it was made, and the condition of the subject-matter of the contract, that a literal interpretation of the language of the parties would fail to give effect to their intention. It is upon this principle that extrinsic evidence is always allowable, to enable the court to place itself in the position occupied by the parties themselves when they contracted, that thus it may the better discern their real intention.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage““Parties to a contract are always to be supposed to have intended something, rather than nothing, by what they have said.””
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.