United States v. Stephens’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

8 federal appellate · 3 district · 1 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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““Whenever any person indebted to the United States is insolvent, or whenever the estate of any deceased debtor, in the hands of the executors or administrators, is insufficient to pay all the debts due from the deceased, the debts due to the United States shall be first satisfied; and the priority established shall extend as well to cases in which a debtor, not having sufficient property to pay all his debts, makes a voluntary assignment thereof, or in which the estate and effects of an absconding, concealed, or absent debtor are attached by process of law, as to cases in which an act of bankruptcy is committed.””

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. Grieb v. Commissioner · 217 F. Supp. 545 - United States v. Sachs

2. ““Every executor, administrator, or assignee, or other person, who pays, in whole or in part, any debt due by the person or estate for whom or for which he acts before he satisfies and pays the debts due to the United States from such person or estate, shall become answerable in his own person and estate to the extent of such payments for the debts so due to the United States, or for so much thereof as may remain due and unpaid.””

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. Grieb v. Commissioner · 217 F. Supp. 545 - United States v. Sachs

3. ““It is axiomatic that an action based entirely upon a statute, as the action in this case under Section 3467 avowedly is, must find its warrant in the statute, and courts cannot, upon the pretence of construing it, enlarge its coverage to bring within it those not expressly or by clear intendment embraced within its terms. “That the defendant as receiver is not expressly included in it by name or designation, the most casual reading of the invoked section makes plain. That he is not included in it by implication or intendment is, we think, made even more clear by a careful reading of Section 3466 and 3467 and an understanding of the settled law that a receiver in a state court is an officer or arm of the court, he is not a representative of the parties. [The Court then quoted from treatises and cases which set forth the same concepts prevailing under California law, namely, that the receiver is an agent or “the hand or arm” of the court.] * * * * * * “A consideration of the statutory scheme, in light of these principles, makes completely clear, we think, that this suit to make the defendant ‘answerable in his own person and estate’ because of his official actions as the court’s receiver and under its orders, finds no warrant or support in that scheme. “ * * * [W]e find the same personal representatives [executor, administrator, assignee] mentioned by name and the added words ‘or other person’ limited to those who stand as personal representatives not only by the application o”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. United States v. Crocker