Barker v. Brown’s Empirical Analysis
1975
Citation profile
2 district · 32 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 39 later decisions — most recently February 2025 · most notably 30 Cal. 3d 358 - Sprecher v. Adamson Companies (1981), 71 Ill. App. 3d 691 - Mahurin v. Lockhart (1979)
2 district · 32 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 McCarthy v. Ference · Kurtigian v. City of Worcester · 5 N.C. App. 60 - Rowe v. McGee · Dudley v. Meadowbrook, Inc. · 221 Pa. Super. 338 - Starke v. Long
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 39 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[A] possessor of land in or adjacent to a developed or residential area is subject to liability for harm caused to others outside of the land by a defect in the condition of a tree thereon, if the exercise of reasonable care by the possessor (a) would have disclosed the defect and the risk involved therein, and (b) would have made it reasonably safe by repair or otherwise.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage““(2) A possessor of land in an urban area is subject to liability to persons using a public highway for physical harm resulting from his failure to exercise reasonable care to prevent an unreasonable risk of harm arising from the condition of trees on the land near the highway.””
4 later decisions quote this exact passage““A tree growing in an urban or residential setting does not have the same relation to surrounding land as a tree located in a rural setting. That tree, once growing in the midst of a forest, is no longer the same ‘natural object’ when a city ... or residential areas are developed in proximity to it. Specifically the relatively minor expenditures in time and money that it will take to inspect and secure trees in a developed or residential area is not large when compared with the increased danger and potential for damages represented by the fall of such a tree.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Wynkoop v. Luke
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.