Smith v. Mitchell’s Empirical Analysis
1947
Citation profile
16 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions — most recently January 1975
16 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 Loucks v. . Standard Oil Co. · Ross v. Ross · Van Matre v. Sankey · Pfeifer v. Wright · Finley v. Brown
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 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““We think the effect of the Court’s decision in these cases is that if a child is adopted or legitimated in a foreign state it can inherit from the parent in Tennessee provided the law of the foreign state is not inconsistent with, or opposed to, the policy of our own state. In other words, if a child is capable of inheriting in the foreign state, he, being legitimated by marriage of the parents and by force of law, is thereby legitimated in Tennessee, and is capable of inheriting lands lying in this state. But the rights acquired under foreign adoption or legitimation will not be enlarged so as to confer rights of inheritance in this state contrary to our own statute of descent. ’ ’”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Evans v. Young““The effect of our holding in Finley v. Brown, supra, ( 122 Tenn. 316 , 123 S.W. 363 ) is that children who are legitimate in one state are legitimaté everywhere, with this important qualification, ‘ States acting by comity will not permit a statute of a foreign state to extend any further than a local statute upon the same subject, or to confer any other rights; thus pursuing the principle that the lex loci rei sitae must control in the disposition of real estate.’ ””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Evans v. Young““ . . . And according to the statute of Alabama the petitioners thereby became the legitimate children of their parents. But the question before us is still unsolved. Are they the lawful children of their parents in Alabama and bastards in Tennessee, because they did not go along with their parents and establish a domicile in Alabama when the marriage took place? We think not.””
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.