Breen v. Phelps’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
6 district · 594 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 606 later decisions — most recently April 2025 · most notably S.M.S. Textile Mills, Inc. v. Brown, Jacobson, Tillinghast, Lahan & King, P.C. (1993), Dunham v. Dunham (1987)
6 district · 594 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 Messenger v. Anderson · Amodio v. Cunningham · Rosenblatt v. Baer · Nowak v. Nowak · Rosewell Messinger v. Peter Anderson
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 606 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A judge should hesitate to change his own rulings in a case and should be even more reluctant to overrule those of another judge.”
88 later decisions quote this exact passage“[a] judge should hesitate to change his own rulings in a case and should be even more reluctant to overrule those of another judge. . . . Judge shopping is not to be encouraged and a decent respect for the views of his brethren on the bench is commendable in a judge.”
17 later decisions quote this exact passage“The acts of part performance must be of such a character that they can be reasonably accounted for in no other way than by the existence of some contract in relation to the subject matter in dispute. [Citation omitted.] The question is whether the facts provable within the framework of the complaint, giving its allegations a construction as favorable to the plaintiff as reasonable, would bring his case within these principles.”
12 later decisions 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.