Freeman v. Stanbern Construction Co.’s Empirical Analysis
1954
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 6 district · 53 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 72 later decisions — most recently July 2011 · most notably I. W. Berman Properties v. Porter Bros. (1975), Evergreen Amusement Corp. v. Milstead (1998)
6 federal appellate · 6 district · 53 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 Beatty v. . Guggenheim Exploration Co. · Bartlett v. Stanchfield · Markoff v. Kreiner · Grand Trunk Western R. v. H. W. Nelson Co. · Wood v. City of Fort Wayne
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 72 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Attempts of parties to tie up by contract their freedom of dealing with each other are futile. The contract is a fact to be taken into account in interpreting the subsequent conduct of the plaintiff and the defendant, no doubt. But it cannot be assumed, as matter of law, that the contract governed all that was done until it was renounced in so many words, because the parties had a right to renounce it in any way and by any mode of expression they saw fit. They could substitute a new oral contract by conduct and intimation, as well as by express words.””
6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[I]n the absence of duress, fraud, or mistake, parol evidence of conversations before or at the time of the execution of a contract must be excluded. Of course, the existence of a separate oral agreement as to any matter on which a written contract is silent, and which is not inconsistent with its terms, may be proved by parol, if under the circumstances of the case it may be properly inferred that the parties did not intend the written contract to be a complete and final statement of the whole transaction between them. [Freeman v. Stanbern Construction Co., 205 Md. 71, 77-78 , 106 A.2d 50, 54 (1954).]”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority““It is an elementary rule of the common law that parol evidence is inadmissible to vary or contradict the terms of a written instrument. The reason for that rule, as we said in Markoff v. Kreiner, 180 Md. 150 , 23 A. 2d 19 , is that when contracting parties have discussed and agreed upon their obligations to each other and reduced them to writing, their written contract is more reliable as evidence than memory.” Id. at 77.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Davidson v. Katz
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.