Brightman v. Bates’s Empirical Analysis
1900
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 2 district · 34 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 40 later decisions — most recently August 2007 · most notably City of Boston v. Treasurer & Receiver General (1921), Glazer v. Glazer (1967)
3 federal appellate · 2 district · 34 state decisions — followed in 12 states
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 Gibbs v. Consolidated Gas Co. of Baltimore · Smith v. San Francisco & North Pacific Railway Co. · 2 E.H. Smith 519 - Williams v. . Montgomery · Faulds v. Yates · Barnes v. Smith
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 40 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“* * * The question before us is not whether it would be possible to carry out the contract in a way which would have made the contract bad if specified in it, but whether it was impossible to carry out the contract in a way which might lawfully have been specified in advance. We put the question in this form because there is no doubt that the subscribers might actually have done the things stipulated without giving any one a right to complain. That is to say, they might have held their stock and voted by previous understanding according to the advice of the committee, as long as they chose. The question is what they might contract to do; for this is supposed to be a case where a contract to do lawful acts is unlawful.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Hart v. Bell
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.