Murdock v. . Gould’s Empirical Analysis
1908
Citation profile
6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently April 2014
6 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 Thomas v. . Scutt · White's Bank of Buffalo v. Myles · Trustees of the Freeholders & Commonalty of Southampton v. Jessup · Newall v. . Bartlett
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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Evidence to explain an ambiguity, establish a custom, or show the meaning of technical terms, and the like, is not regarded as an exception to the general rule, because it does not contradict or vary the written instrument, but simply places the court in the position of the parties when they made the contract, and enables it to appreciate the force of the words they used in reducing it to writing. It is received where doubt arises upon the face of the instrument as to its meaning, not to enable the court to hear what the parties said, but to enable it to understand what they wrote as they understood it at the time.”
1 later decision 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.