Hodges v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1927
Citation profile
27 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 31 later decisions — most recently February 2004 · most notably Stein v. Lukas (1992), Union Pacific Railroad v. Barber (2004)
27 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 Spear Mining Co. v. Shinn · St. Louis Southwestern Railway Co. v. Owings · American Soda Fountain Co. v. Battle · Wells v. Shepard · Finley v. Clift
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 31 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“... negligence alone, however gross, is not sufficient to justify the award of punitive damages. There must be some element of wantonness or such a conscious indifference to the consequences that malice might be inferred. In other words, in order to warrant a submission of the question of punitive damages, there must be an element of willfulness or such reckless conduct on the part of the defendant as is equivalent thereto.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Dalrymple v. Fields
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.