178 W. Va. 395 - Smith v. Perry’s Empirical Analysis
1987
Citation profile
4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently December 2013
4 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 166 W. Va. 581 - Bond v. City of Huntington · 171 W. Va. 97 - Wells v. Smith · 171 W. Va. 397 - Perry v. Melton · Mayer v. Frobe · Carper v. Kanawha Banking & Trust Co.
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.
““Where not required by statute, special interrogatories in aid of a general verdict should be used cautiously and only to clarify rather than to obfuscate the issues involved.””
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.