Foster v. Blount’s Empirical Analysis
1851
Citation profile
1 district · 20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 25 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 1983 · most notably United States Cement Co. v. Cooper (1909), Winters v. City of Duluth (1901)
1 district · 20 state decisions — followed in 14 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.
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 25 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““ But this is a rule of construction, by which courts are to ascertain the intention of the legislature, and when that is apparent, we are bound by it and can no more disregard the intention in the exposition of a penal statute than any other. If we were to restrict the meaning of general words, when the framers of the'law, by the use of them, intended to embrace other persons or things not embraced by the partic ular words, we should annul the law, instead of executing it.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.