Smith Ex Rel. Smith v. Mears’s Empirical Analysis
1940
Citation profile
33 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 33 later decisions — most recently December 2018 · most notably House v. House (1949), Seawell v. Seawell (1951)
33 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 33 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A codicil is a supplement to a will, annexed for the purpose of expressing the testator's after-thought or amended intention.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“It is this quest for the variant minds of testators, with no two situated exactly alike, and the necessity of interpreting language according to the circumstances of its use, that often results in close distinctions and renders the law of wills sui generis. Richardson v. Cheek, supra; McIver v. McKinney, 184 N.C. 393 , 114 S.E. 399 . Yet after saying this, we assiduously pursue the adjudicated cases for any gleam of light that may help us with the problem in hand. Worthy ideas expressed elsewhere and on other occasions, like nuggets of truth when or wherever found, know no barriers of time or place. It is only the foggy horizon that shuts them out.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Hubbard v. Wiggins
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.