Hamon v. Hamon’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

16 state decisions

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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““This is a will contest. The testator, John Hamon, was a bachelor until he was eighty-three years old, then he married a woman of twenty-five years. He was married August 2, 1899. The will was made August 17th, and he died in November of that year. His estate was estimated at $18,000 or $20,000. It consisted chiefly of a farm of 293 acres in Platte county. By his will he gave all his property (except nominal bequests) to 'his wife, and named her brother to be the sole executor without bond. His heirs were a brother and sister and the children and grandchildren of deceased brothers and sisters. They are the plaintiffs in this suit; the defendants are the widow and the executor. ... If ... it should be conceded that the plaintiffs’ testimony went all the way to prove that the testator was afflicted with senile dementia on the subject of women, it stopped short of the point of tending to show that he did not possess mental capacity to make a will. A man may be demented on one subject, he may be old and feeble in mind and body, childish, yet if he has mind and memory enough to know what property he has, to know how he-wants to will it, who the objects of his bounty are, and the disposition he is making of his estate, he possesses all the capacity the law requires to enable him to make a will. The evidence for the defendants showed that the testator possessed this capacity in a degree at least equal to that that could be expected in a man of his age, and the testimony for the plai”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Wisner v. Chandler