Aaron Sage v. George Hampe’s Empirical Analysis
235 U.S. 99 · 1914
Citation profile
9 federal appellate · 22 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 56 later decisions (9 by the Supreme Court) — most recently December 1982 · most notably Eastman Kodak Co of New York v. Southern Photo Materials Co (1927), Brooklyn Sav Bank v. O'Neil Dize (1945)
9 federal appellate · 22 state decisions — followed in 11 states
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 Oscanyan v. Arms Co. · McMullen v. Hoffman · Globe Refining Company v. Landa Cotton Oil Company · Trist v. Child · McNulta v. Lochridge
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 56 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““* * * [N]o doubt it is true that a man may contract that a future event shall come to pass over which he has no, or only a limited, power. Globe Ref. Co. v. Landa Cotton Oil Co., 190 U.S. 540, 545 , 23 Sup.Ct. 754 , 47 L.Ed. 1171, 1173 . And we assume in accordance with the decision of the Kansas courts that the principle applies to contracts for the conveyance of land that the contractor does not own. But that principle is not enough to dispose of the case, even if, subject to what we have to say hereafter, the universality of the invalidating language of the statute (‘any contract’) be confined to contracts by the owners of the land. A contract that on its face requires an illegal act, either of the contractor or a third person, no more imposes a liability to damages for nonperformance than it creates an equity to compel the contractor to perform. A contract that invokes prohibited conduct makes the contractor a contributor to such conduct. Kalem Co. v. Harper Bros., 222 U.S. 55, 63 , 32 Sup.Ct. 20 , 56 L.Ed. 92, 96 , Ann.Cas.1913A, 1285. And more broadly, it long has been recognized that contracts that obviously and directly tend in a marked degree to bring about results that the law seeks to prevent cannot be made the ground of a successful suit. Providence Tool Co. v. Norris, 2 Wall. 45 , 17 L.Ed. 868 ; Trist v. Child (Busk v. Child), 21 Wall. 441 , 22 L.Ed. 623 ; Oscanyan v. Winchester Repeating Arms Co., 103 U.S. 261 , 26 L.Ed. 539 ; Fuller v. Dame, 18 Pick. 472 . It ”
3 later decisions 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.