Hooff v. Paine’s Empirical Analysis
1939
Citation profile
15 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 17 later decisions — most recently April 2007
15 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 City Street Improvement Co. v. Pearson · Richmond Engineering & Manufacturing Corp. v. Loth · Goodbody v. Margiotti · Coleman v. Pearman · Bank of the Ohio Valley v. Lockwood
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 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The law is well settled that forbearance, or the promise of forbearance, to prosecute a well-founded or doubtful claim is a sufficient consideration for a contract. On the other hand, the forbearance to prosecute an invalid, worthless or unfounded claim is not a consideration recognized by the law as valuable. 12 Am. Jur., Contracts, section 84, section 85, section 86 and section 87; 8 Cor. Jur., Bills and Notes, section 373; Elliott on Contracts, Vol. 1, section 235; City Street Improvement Company v. F. E. Pearson, 181 Cal. 640 , 185 P. 962 , 20 A. L. R. 1317. “In 13 Cor. Jur., ‘Contracts,’ section 197, is found this very lucid statement of the general rule: ‘The principle followed in perhaps the majority of cases is that one has a right to sue where his claim is reasonably doubtful, and that forbearance to enforce a claim which might reasonably be thought doubtful is a sufficient consideration, on the ground that “the reality of the claim which is given up must be measured, not by the state of the law as it is ultimately discovered to be, but by the state of the knowledge of the person who at the time has to judge and make the concessions.” From this it is clear that, if the right is not doubtful, there is no consideration, for there is neither benefit to the promisor nor detriment to the promisee, and, therefore, forbearance or a promise to forbear to insist on a claim clearly unenforceable cannot be a consideration. This is true, for example, of a promise to forbear fro”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“In Michie’s Digest of Virginia and West Virginia Reports, vol. 2,”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.