Salmon v. McCrary’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

40 state decisions

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 40 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “While the rule may be said to be a strict or harsh one, it is rightly so. Let it be remembered that one who seeks specific performance of an alleged oral contract as against the estate of a decedent is, in effect, asking that property which would otherwise descend by inheritance, as fixed by the law, or by will as determined by the owner, be decreed to be in him. The law quite properly favors the disposition of property through the channels it has prescribed, and requires strict proof to divert it from those channels. When one dies, and is thus no longer able to manage his own estate, the law undertakes to stand as guardian for it and to see that it is legally disposed of, either to his heirs at law or to his legatees under a will as the case requires. In such confidence we live and die, protected by the safeguards established by the law.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Matthews v. Blanos

2. “Contracts under which one of the contracting parties agrees with the other, for a valuable consideration, that he will make a will giving to the other property, either real or personal, have been sustained and enforced in America from the earliest times, and the validity of such contracts seems now to be beyond all doubt.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Matthews v. Blanos