Reece v. Webster’s Empirical Analysis
1953
Citation profile
10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently December 2004
10 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 Biddle v. Riley · Southwestern Gas Electric Company v. Deshazo · Coca-Cola Bottling Co. of Helena v. Mattice · Johnson v. Greenfield
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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The doctrine of res ipsa loquitur was developed to assist in the proof of negligence where the cause of an unusual happening connected with some instrumentality in the exclusive possession and control of the defendant could not be readily established by the plaintiff. The theory was that since the instrumentality was in the possession of the defendant, justice required that the defendant be compelled to offer an explanation of the event or be burdened with a presumption of negligence.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage““Of course, in cases where the plaintiff has full knowledge and testified to the specific act of negligence which is the cause of the injury complained of, or where there is direct evidence as to the precise cause of the accident and all of the facts and circumstances attendant upon the occurrence clearly appear — then the doctrine would not apply” 2 .”
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.