Rich v. Witherspoon’s Empirical Analysis
1948
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 8 later decisions — most recently January 1980
2 federal appellate · 6 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 McMurry v. Stanley · Ricketts v. Alliance Life Ins. Co. · 22 Tex. Civ. App. 247 - Weller v. Weller · Booth v. Krug
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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The declaration of trust, whether written or oral, must be reasonably certain in its material terms; and this requisite of certainty includes the subject matter or property embraced within the trust, the beneficiaries or persons in whose behalf it is created, the nature and quantity of interest that they are to have, and the manner in which the trust is to be performed. If the language is so vague, general, or equivocal that any of these necessary elements of the trust is left in real uncertainty, then the trust must fail. The settlor’s language must admit of the construction that he intended to impose an imperative obligation. Uncertainty or vagueness as to the subject matter on which it is to operate may be taken as indicative of an intention merely to suggest a course of conduct to the donee rather than to impose an obligation. The donor’s language will not be construed as creating a trust where the objects of the asserted trust are uncertain, where the property to be affected with the asserted trust is not defined, where the person to whom the settlor’s wish is addressed has a clear discretion to act as he thinks fit, or where the words vesting ownership in the donee are absolute and irreconcilable with the suggestion that the donor intended some limitation on such ownership.” 57 Tex.Jur.2d, Trusts, § 27, p. 406. “When a disposer of property does not expressly charge the grantee or donee with the duty of holding it in trust or of disposing of it at some future time in so”
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.