Goins v. McLoud’s Empirical Analysis
1950
Citation profile
24 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 24 later decisions — most recently December 2002
24 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 Allore v. Jewell · Supervisors v. Kennicott · Sprinkle v. Wellborn. · Wessell v. . Rathjohn · Paine v. . Roberts
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 24 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"[A] person has mental capacity sufficient to contract if he knows what he is about (Moffit v. Witherspoon, 32 N.C. 185 ; Paine v. Roberts, 82 N.C. 451 ), * * * [T]he measure of capacity is the ability to understand the nature of the act in which he is engaged and its scope and effect, or its nature and consequences, not that he should be able to act wisely or discreetly, nor to drive a good bargain, but that he should be in such possession of his faculties as to enable him to know at least what he is doing and to contract understandingly." Goins v. McLoud, 231 N.C. 655 , 58 S.E.2d 634 .”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“. . . based upon your acquaintance with and observation of [the ward], do you have an opinion satisfactory to yourself as to whether or not [the ward] had sufficient mental capacity to understand the nature and consequences of her act in signing a deed on May 6, 1976, which said deed had the intended effect of conveying her interest in certain real property to the defendants?”
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.