Ward v. Whalen’s Empirical Analysis
1981
Citation profile
2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently September 2016
2 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 Dale D. Akins, Inc. v. Commonwealth, Department of Labor & Industry
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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The legislature had some purpose for including an agent or officer of a corporation employing persons in the Commonwealth within the definition of employer, and the only apparent purpose was to subject these persons to liability in the event that a corporation or similar entity failed to make wage payments. Its reason for doing so is obvious. Decisions dealing with personnel matters and the expenditure of corporate funds are made by corporate officers and it is far more likely that the limited funds of an insolvent corporation will be used to pay wages and that a work force will be reduced while the corporation is still capable of meeting its obligations to its employes if personal liability is imposed on the persons who make these decisions.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“every person, firm, partnership, association, corporation, receiver or other officer of a court of this Commonwealth and any agent or officer of any of the above-mentioned classes employing any person in this Commonwealth.”
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.