Needam v. Needam’s Empirical Analysis
1945
Citation profile
25 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 28 later decisions — most recently February 2023 · most notably 20 Md. App. 499 - Picarella v. Picarella (1974), MacDougall v. Levick (2017)
25 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 Kirby v. Gilliam · Payne v. Payne · Perkey v. Perkey · Stanley v. Rasnick
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 28 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he public policy of Virginia ... has been to uphold the validity of the marriage status as for the best interest of society, except where marriage is prohibited between certain persons,”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““Marriages of minors over the age of consent for marriage are not ‘supposed to be void’ merely because of the lack of parental consent. The provision for parental consent is directory and preventive, rather than prohibitive, of the consummation of the marriage contract. Minors over the age of consent for marriage have the capacity to enter into the marriage relation. Their marriage is a permissible status. It is not merely a contract between infants.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“the nature of the marriage relation and for reasons of sound public policy.”
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.