Smith v. Bruce’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
2 district · 25 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 27 later decisions — most recently February 2023 · most notably Herren v. Pettengill (2000), Lines v. State of Ga. (1980)
2 district · 25 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 Tietjen v. Meldrim · Klein v. Dove · Oswald v. Grenet · East Atlanta Land Co. v. Mower · Dunaway v. Windsor
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 27 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The naming of the subdivision, “East Beach Subdivision”; the subdividing of practically all of the land area owned except the beach area; the designating of the front or easternmost street as “Beach Drive”; the leaving of an open area between an area designated as “smooth, hard beach” and “Beach Drive” without any reservations; the entering on the plat “Atlantic Ocean”; the failure to afford otherwise any reasonable means of access from the lots and streets in East Beach Subdivision to the smooth, hard beach and ocean; the designation of a line as “mean high water line” between the area designated as smooth, hard beach and “Beach Drive”; and the selling of one or more lots referring to such area in the recorded plat, conveyed to each purchaser in the subdivision an easement, to use such open area as a soft beach for all recreational purposes soft beaches can be used for, and as a means of ingress and egress from the subdivision lots and streets to the smooth, hard beach area and ocean.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Bruce v. Garges“[u]nless the impetus of the plan was to afford buyers of lots an easement to the beach areas on the plat, the deeds made with reference thereto would be deceptively misleading. `It would ... be the height of injustice, and contrary to every principle of good faith, to permit [the developers] to derive this advantage, and then frustrate the expectations held out ....'”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“'When water so far encroaches on land that a tract which was formerly riparian is completely submerged or washed away and land formerly non-riparian becomes riparian, subsequent accretions belong to the owner of the tract newly made riparian even though such accretions in time extend over the area formerly owned by an adjoining, and the original riparian owner....'”
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.