Saunders v. Mullinix’s Empirical Analysis
1950
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 8 district · 38 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 51 later decisions — most recently December 2023 · most notably I. W. Berman Properties v. Porter Bros. (1975), Keys v. Chrysler Credit Corp. (1985)
3 federal appellate · 8 district · 38 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 Swartz v. Gottlieb-Bauern-Schmidt-Straus Brewing 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 51 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]he gist of a conversion is not the acquisition of the property by the wrongdoer, but the wrongful deprivation of a person of property to the possession of which he is entitled. Accordingly, a conversion occurs at such time as a person is deprived of property which he is entitled to possess.”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“According to this legislative commentary, the claim of right defense in Maryland originated in Saunders v. Mullinix, 195 Md. 235 , 72 A.2d 720 (1950). The Saunders Court, in referring to this defense in dicta, stated: It is a generally accepted rule in criminal prosecutions that one who either takes or retains the property of another without the latter’s consent for a debt which he in good faith claims to be due him by the owner of the property is not guilty of larceny, because the existence of the debt or the bona fide belief in its existence shows a lack of felonious intent in the taking or detention of the property. Id. at 240 , 72 A.2d at 722 . We note parenthetically that Saunders was a civil conversion case, and the court discussed the claim of right defense by contrasting it to the tort of conversion.”
2 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.