McHugh v. McHugh’s Empirical Analysis
1898
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 45 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 55 later decisions — most recently May 2016 · most notably Beers v. Bayliner Marine Corp. (1996), Commonwealth v. Goldblum (1982)
2 federal appellate · 45 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 Chicago City Railway Co. v. McMahon · Brown v. Schock · Winchell v. Edwards · Hastings v. Stetson · Snell v. Bray
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 55 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The spoliation of papers and the destruction or withholding of evidence which a party ought to produce gives rise to a presumption unfavorable to him, as his conduct may properly be attributed to his supposed knowledge that the truth would operate against him. This principle has been applied in a great variety of cases, and it is now so well established that it is unnecessary to do more than state it.””
2 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.