19 Cal. 3d 564 - Justus v. Atchison’s Empirical Analysis
1977
Citation profile
12 federal appellate · 12 district · 462 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 515 later decisions — most recently August 2021 · most notably 48 Cal. 3d 644 - Thing v. La Chusa (1989), 52 Cal. 3d 65 - Rojo v. Kliger (1990)
12 federal appellate · 12 district · 462 state decisions — followed in 25 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 Moragne v. States Marine Lines, Inc. · 13 Cal. 3d 804 - Nga Li v. Yellow Cab Co. · 19 Cal. 3d 441 - Borer v. American Airlines, Inc.
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 515 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In enacting the wrongful death statute, our Legislature probably initially conceived that it was creating a right of recovery unknown to the common law. But from this premise alone, I am unable to divine an affirmative legislative intent to preclude further judicial development. I find nothing in the statute or its history which anticipates and forbids the evolution of recovery for wrongful death into a universally recognized right of common law status. Judicial expansion and refinement of legal concepts characterizes the common law — any legislative intent to foreclose such traditional judicial activity should require positive expression. ... Just as “a statute is not an alien intruder in the house of the common law” (Stone, The Common Law in the United States (1936) 50 Harv.L.Rev. 4, 15), so too the evolving common law should be a welcome guest to domains previously thought statutory.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“We have carefully considered these arguments, each of which finds support in one or more of the out-of-state decisions recognizing a cause of action for the wrongful death of a fetus. They are not all equally convincing, and some are put in serious question by the decisions rejecting this cause of action and by the legal scholars. But we need not enter this debate, less still attempt to settle it. The considerations advanced by plaintiffs would be relevant if we were called upon to decide whether California should adopt the proposed cause of action as a matter of judge-made law; they are not persuasive when, as here, the cause of action for wrongful death in this state is a pure creature of statute.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Castro v. Melchor.
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.