Smith v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1940
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 19 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 29 later decisions — most recently August 2016 · most notably United States v. Anderson (2012), Abofreka v. Alston Tobacco Co. (1986)
6 federal appellate · 19 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.
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 29 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[A] battery is committed where one person administers a drug to another by inducing the other voluntarily to take the drug in the belief that he is taking some other substance, or by placing the drug in some otherwise harmless substance and inducing the other to take such substance without knowledge that it contains a drug. The deceit practiced in such a case by means of which the person is induced to take the drug, is a fraud on his will equivalent to force.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Generally speaking, a battery is the unlawful touching or striking of another by the aggressor himself or by any substance put in motion by him, done with the intention of bringing about a harmful or offensive contact which is not le- gaily consented to by the other, and not otherwise privileged. It is sometimes defined as any injury done to the person of another in a rude, insolent, or revengeful way,”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“If words are susceptible of two meanings, one imputing a crime, and the other innocence, the latter is not to be adopted, and the other rejected, as a matter of course. In such a case, it must be left to the jury to decide in what sense defendant used them. Their conclusion must be formed from the whole of the circumstances attending the publication, including the sense in which the witnesses understood the words.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Parrish v. Allison
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.