Compton v. Evans’s Empirical Analysis
1939
Citation profile
31 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 35 later decisions — most recently December 2009 · most notably 13 Wash. 2d 673 - In Re the Welfare of Hudson (1942), 77 Wash. 2d 178 - Warner v. McCaughan (1969)
31 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 Hill v. United States · Banfield Et Ux. v. Addington Et Ux. · Waller v. First Savings & Trust Co. · Union Tool Co. v. Farmers & Merchants National Bank of Los Angeles · Riddoch v. State
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 35 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"[w]hen an act complained of is a breach of specific terms of the contract, without any reference to the legal duties imposed by law upon the relationship created thereby, the action is in contract, but where there is a contract for services which places the parties in such a relation to each other that, in attempting to perform the promised service, a duty imposed by law as a result of the contractual relationship between the parties is violated through an act which incidentally prevents the performance of the contract, then the gravamen of the action is a breach of the legal duty, and not of the contract itself, and in such case allegations of the latter are considered mere inducement, showing the relationship which furnishes the right of action for the tort, but not the basis of recovery for it."”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage““What is really sought in this case is to induce the court to read into the contract, as a term thereof, the general legal obligation to use due care, and then, having thus made it a term of the contract, to hold that the contract was breached by the alleged failure to use due care, as set out in paragraph 5 of the complaint. As was recently said in Noble v. Martin, 191 Wash. 39 , 70 P. (2d) 1064 : “ ‘It has not been the policy of this court to imply a contract where the gravamen of the action is a negligent or tortious act, as may be seen from a discussion of the matter in Northern Grain & Warehouse Co. v. Holst, 95 Wash. 312 , 163 Pac. 775 .’ ””
1 later decision quote this exact passage“In this case, the substance of the action is the elaborately alleged negligence of [the defendant], the breach of her legal duty to use due care in performing the contract with plaintiff, a duty which . . . existed independent of contract. In our opinion, this action is founded on tort.”
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.