Pendrey v. Barnes’s Empirical Analysis
1985
Citation profile
18 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 18 later decisions — most recently January 2023
18 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 Strother v. Hutchinson
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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The proximate cause of the injuries in the instant cases was the negligent act of the thief in the operation of the vehicle. Thus, even assuming negligence on the part of the defendant in the first instance in leaving his key in the vehicle * * *, the chain of causation was broken by the negligence of the thief in operating the vehicle. In other words, there was an efficient intervening cause, a new and independent force which severed the chain of causation.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“whether the operator of a motor vehicle who leaves his motor vehicle unattended with the key in the ignition and the door unlocked is liable for injuries sustained to a third person resulting from the negligent operation of the motor vehicle by a thief.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“the theft of [a] motor vehicle was a sufficient superseding cause to, as a matter of law, absolve [the defendant] from responsibility for [the plaintiff's] injuries.”
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.