Sumner v. Davis’s Empirical Analysis
1955
Citation profile
43 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 43 later decisions — most recently May 2024 · most notably Pinkard v. Mendel (1960), Rowan v. Herring (1958)
43 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 Calvary Independent Baptist Church v. City of Rome · Mayor of Athens v. Gerdine · Shippen v. Folsom · Clein v. Kaplan · Brown v. Lawrence
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 43 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“`While our declaratory-judgment statute itself says that it should be liberally construed, it manifestly was never intended to be applicable to every occasion or question arising from any justiciable controversy, since the statute does not take the place of existing remedies. It therefore follows that where there exists a remedy, either in law or in equity, a petition for declaratory judgment will lie only when there be some fact or circumstances which necessitate a determination of disputes, not merely for the purpose of enforcing accrued rights, but in order to guide and protect the petitioner from uncertainty and insecurity with respect to the propriety of some future act or conduct which is properly incident to his alleged rights, and which future action without such direction might reasonably jeopardize his interest. Shippen v. Folsom, 200 Ga. 58 ( 35 S. E. 2d 915 ); Clein v. Kaplan, 201 Ga. 396 ( 40 S. E. 2d 133 ); 1 C. J. S. 1027, § 18; 16 Am. Jur. 280 , 286, §§ 7 and 13.' Mayor &c. of Athens v. Gerdine, 202 Ga. 197 ( 42 S. E. 2d 567 ). See also Georgia Marble Co. v. Tucker, 202 Ga. 390 ( 43 S. E. 2d 245 ).”
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.