Slater v. Mexican National Railroad’s Empirical Analysis
194 U.S. 120 · 1904
Citation profile
174 federal appellate · 44 district · 100 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 492 later decisions (35 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2018 · most notably Gulf Oil Corporation v. Gilbert (1947), Lauritzen v. Larsen (1953)
174 federal appellate · 44 district · 100 state decisions — followed in 20 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedMexican Nat. R. v. Slater (from Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Huntington v. Attrill · Kring v. State of Missouri · Texas & Pacific Railway Co. v. Cox · Dennick v. Railroad Co.
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 492 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[W]hen such a liability is enforced in a jurisdiction foreign to the place of the wrongful act, obviously that does not mean that the act in any degree is subject to the lex fori , with regard to either its quality or its consequences. On the other hand, it equally little means that the law of the place of the act is operative outside its own territory. The theory of the foreign suit is that although the act complained of was subject to no law having force in the forum, it gave rise to an obligation, an obligatio , which, like other obligations, follows the person and may be enforced wherever the person may be found.... But as the only source of this obligation is the law of the place of the act, it follows that the law determines not merely the existence of the obligation, ... but equally determines its extent.”
9 later decisions 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.