Fischer v. Moore’s Empirical Analysis
1973
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 61 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 67 later decisions — most recently November 2007 · most notably Waterson v. General Motors Corp. (1988), Vizzini v. Ford Motor Co. (1977)
4 federal appellate · 61 state decisions — followed in 17 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.
Relationships
Relies on Miller v. Miller · Osborne v. Montgomery · Newbury v. Vogel · 91 Ill. App. 2d 1 - Mount v. McClellan · Perkins v. Vermont Hydro-Electric Corp.
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 67 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"We conclude, as the Court of Appeals has, that the failure of the driver or passenger in a motor vehicle to use a seat belt does not constitute contributory negligence and may not be pleaded as a bar to recovery of damages in an action against a tort-feasor whose negligence provides the initiating force and is a proximate cause of an injury to a driver or passenger. [Citation omitted.] If we were to hold otherwise, the person who was driving a Volkswagen, and not a Mack Truck, could be said to be more vulnerable to injury and, therefore, guilty of contributing to his own injury as a matter of law. Such a result would be contrary to the entire `fault' philosophy which is found throughout the law of tort. "Moreover, to us, it would be improper for an injured driver or passenger to be penalized in the eyes of the jury by permitting evidence to be presented that a seat belt was available which had not been put in use. The seat belt defense would soon become a fortuitous windfall to tort-feasors and would tend to cause rampant speculation as to the reduction (or increase) in the amount of recoverable damages attributable to the failure to use available seat belts. [Citations omitted.] In comparing the cases which we have cited, it is apparent that the acceptance of the seat belt defense can only be justified as a deviation from common-law negligence on a public policy theory. [Citation omitted.] The legislature, and not the judiciary, serves as the barometer of public policy in C”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“. . . [T]he common law dictates that the tortfeasor may not rely upon the injured party’s failure to utilize a voluntary protective device to escape all or a portion of the damages which the plaintiff incurred as a consequence of the defendant’s negligence. [ 517 P.2d at 459 ].”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority““[I]t is axiomatic that the tort-feasor must accept the plaintiff as he finds him and may not seek to reduce the amount of damages by spotlighting the physical frailties of the injured party at the time the tortious force was applied to him.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Hoffman v. Schafer
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.