Mack v. Post Exchange’s Empirical Analysis
1945
Citation profile
2 district · 27 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 35 later decisions — most recently March 2017 · most notably Gibson v. Spartanburg School District 3 (2000), Osteen v. Greenville County School District (1998)
2 district · 27 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.
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.
“Such acts as are necessary to the life, comfort, and convenience of the servant while at work, though strictly personal to himself, and not acts of service, are incidental to the service, and injury sustained in the performance thereof is deemed to have arisen out of the employment. A man must breathe and occasionally drink water while at work. In these and other conceivable instances he ministers unto himself, but in a remote sense these acts contribute to the furtherance of his work.... That such acts will be done in the course of employment is necessarily contemplated, and they are inevitable incidents. Such dangers as attend them, therefore, are incident dangers. At the same time injuries occasioned by them are accidents resulting from the employment.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““And granting that the accidental injury resulted from his effort to gratify nis desire to smoke, such activity did not remove Mack from the protection of the compensation law. “The principle is close akin to the common law of master and servant and the incidental doctrine of detour. Adams v. South Carolina Power Co., 200 S.C. 438 , 21 S.E.2d 17 ; Carroll v. Beard-Laney, Inc. [ 207 S.C. 339 ], 35 S.E.2d 425 , filed September 10, 1945. ‘Slight deviations are' no defense under most state decisions. Thus a slight •deviation to get a chew of tobacco, or to ask a fellow employee the time, or to throw away a cigarette, is harmless, and awards were upheld where the injury occurred during the deviation.’ Horovitz, p. 117, “The reason upon which the rule is founded, insofar as it relates to smoking on the job, is so well stated in the judgment in Whiting-Mead [Commercial] Co. v. Industrial Accident Comm., 178 Cal. 505 , 173 P. 1105, 1106 , 5 A.L.R. 1518 , that we reproduce from it the following: “ ‘From these cases there is deducible a rule which is thus stated in one of them (Archibald v. Workmen’s Compensation Comm’r, [ 77 W.Va. 448 , 87 S.E. 791 , L.R.A.1916D, 1013]): “Such acts as are necessary to the life, comfort, and convenience of the servant while at work, though strictly personal to himself, and not acts of service, are incidental to the service, and injury sustained in the performance thereof is deemed to have arisen out of the employment. A man must breathe and occasionall”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“`they must go further and testify at least that, taking into consideration all the attending data, it is their professional opinion (that) the result in question most probably came from the cause alleged.'”
1 later decision 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.