Veatch v. White’s Empirical Analysis
23 F.2d 69 · 1927
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 1 district ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 8 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 1980
4 federal appellate · 1 district ·
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 Nebraska v. Iowa · State of Washington v. State of Oregon · State of Washington v. State of Oregon · Matter of City of Buffalo
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 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Years ago, between 1859 and 1874, in the southern shore of Puget Island there was a slough running in a northwesterly direction from the Columbia river. The slough, although only used by fishing boats, had a channel that was shallow and more or less filled with snags. So much of the area of Puget Island as was separated from the mainland by this slough was called Coffee Island, which gradually became submerged. Some time before 1894 the water of the river began to bore out and enlarged the slough, and when freshet waters of 1894 came the slough was so enlarged that a channel formed, which after 1894 was used for navigation. After this new channel was created, shoals formed to some extent on the south, or Oregon, side of Coffee Island, and navigation on that side became unsafe for deep draft ships”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“[T]hough by erosion of Puget Island the river has widened and the center of the old channel has been changed somewhat, and has become more shallow than it was at the time of the fixing of the boundary of the state of Oregon, such changes are not to be confused with changes made by the creation of the slough channel, which was caused by sudden and known causes, not by accretion. The demarking line must therefore remain the center of the channel between Puget Island and Oregon before the avulsion.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“But if the change is violent and visible, and arises from a known cause, such as a freshet, or a cut through which a new channel is formed, the original thread of the stream continues to mark the limits of the two estates.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.