Steele v. Crocker’s Empirical Analysis
1951
Citation profile
17 federal appellate · 48 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 68 later decisions — most recently May 2005 · most notably Smith v. New Dixie Lines, Inc. (1959), Nehi Bottling Company v. Lambert (1955)
17 federal appellate · 48 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 Remine v. Whited · Carroll v. Miller · Smith v. Turner · Thornhill v. Thornhill · Drumwright v. Walker
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 68 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““In the present case the accident was due entirely to the act of Mrs. Anderson in driving on the wrong side of the road. The road was practically straight and practically level and her driving lane was 12 feet wide, marked by a plain white line in the middle of the road. The approaching Toler car and Dickinson car were visible for half a mile. The jury could fairly infer from the evidence that both the approaching cars were well on their side of the road close to the edge; both were being driven at reasonable speed; the rain had stopped; no other traffic was then on the road. The jury could conclude that crossing over the white line and striking the Toler car was no mere inadvertence of an alert driver. * * *. “The collision with the Toler car did not necessarily throw the Anderson car out of control. From the photo graphs of the former and other evidence the jury could have concluded that it did not, but that after little more than grazing the Toler car the Anderson car went on in a straight line, without swerving, a distance of 240 feet and crashed practically head-on into the Dickinson car, the right wheels of which were then six inches off the edge of the hard surface. “There is no explanation in the record of these acts of negligence. There is no suggestion of any mechanical defect. The only reasonable explanation, as the jury could determine, was that Mrs. Anderson was asleep or that she was completely and recklessly inattentive to her duties as driver and to the safety”
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.