Furman v. Furman’s Empirical Analysis
1941
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 7 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently June 2013
2 federal appellate · 7 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 Schuylkill Fuel Corp. v. B. & C. Nieberg Realty Corp. · Good Health Dairy Products Corp. v. Emery · Place v. . Hayward · Colby v. Title Insurance & Trust Co. · Ford v. . Harrington
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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““A court of law will not lend its aid to either of the parties to an illegal or fraudulent transaction. However, it is true that where the parties are not equal in guilt (in pari delicto) but where one of them, although participating in the wrong, is less guilty than the other, the party more at fault cannot employ the doctrine of pari delicto to shield his deliberate invasion of the rights of the former. In such a situation, the parties are said to be in particeps criminis and not in pari delicto, and a law court will grant relief to the less guilty of the parties who has suffered a deliberate wrong. Duval v. Wellman, 124 N.Y. 156, 160 , 26 N.E. 343 ; Tracy v. Talmage, 14 N.Y. 162 , 67 Am.Dec. 132; Ayew v. Willard Hawes & Co., Inc., 250 App.Div. 596 , 295 N.Y.S. 49 ; Wood v. Erie Railway Co., 72 N.Y. 196 , 28 Am.Rep. 125 . (Emphasis ours.) “ * * * Under certain circumstances, equity will aid such a plaintiff if it is found that he is the less guilty of the two parties and that he has been deliberately wronged by the defendant. * * * Under such circumstances, equity will not deny the plaintiff relief on the basis of the clean hands maxim unless the parties are in pari delicto. 1 Pomeroy’s Equity Jurisprudence, 4th Ed., § 403; Berman v. Coakley, 243 Mass. 348 , 137 N.E. 667 , 26 A.L.R. 92 ; Colby v. Title Insurance & Trust Co., 160 Cal. 632 , 117 P. 913 , 35 L.R.A., N.S., 813, Ann.Cas. 1913A, 515; 10 R.C.L. § 102, p. 354, and cases there collected. * * * ””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Brand v. Elledge
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.