22 Ark. App. 21 - Moore v. Darling Store Fixtures’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

22 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 22 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “When one suffers an injury at work, the cause is, obviously, either known or unknown. Larson’s treatise on workers’ compensation law states that the most common example of a situation in which the cause of the harm is unknown is the unexplained fall in the course of employment and that most courts confronted with that situation have seen fit to award compensation. However, injuries from idiopathic falls do not arise out of the employment unless the employment contributes to the risk or aggravates the injury by, for example, placing the employee in a position which increases the dangerous effect of the fall, such as on a height, near machinery or sharp corners, or in a moving vehicle. The word “idiopathic” is defined in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (1976), as (1) peculiar to the individual, (2) arising spontaneously or from an obscure or unknown cause. Although the two concepts are frequently confused, Larson says “unexplained fall cases begin with a completely neutral origin of the mishap, while idiopathic fall cases begin with an origin which is admittedly personal and which therefore requires some affirmative employment contribution to offset the prima facie showing of personal origin.” (Citations omitted.)”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 60 Ark. App. 82 - Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau v. Pack

2. “The commonest example of [a neutral risk where the nature of the cause of harm is unknown] is the unexplained fall in the course of employment. If an employee falls while walking down the sidewalk or across a level factory floor for no discoverable reason, the injury resembles that from . . . positional risks in this respect: The particular injury would not have happened if the employee had not been engaged upon an employment errand at the time. In a pure unexplained-fall case, there is no way in which an award can be justified as a matter of causation theory except by a recognition that this but-for reasoning satisfies the “arising” requirement. In appraising the extent to which courts are willing to accept this general but-for theory, then, it is significant to note that most courts confronted with the unexplained-fall problem have seen fit to award compensation.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Logsdon v. ISCO CO.