Johnson v. Johnson’s Empirical Analysis
1966
Citation profile
52 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 52 later decisions — most recently February 2014 · most notably Rutherford v. Katzenberger (1983), Brown v. Brown (1980)
52 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 Dickey v. Dickey · Winkel v. Winkel · Oles Envelope Corp. v. Oles · Bradford v. Futrell · Corley v. Moore
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 52 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"If the father was unable to meet his obligation because he had neither a sufficient estate nor the then ability to pay, as the record seems to indicate, the court was not justified in incarcerating him. * * * Until he was given an opportunity to show that he had neither the estate nor the ability to pay his obligation and failed to make such a showing, he should not have been incarcerated. The purpose of imprisonment for contempt is to compel compliance with a court order but where the person alleged to be in contempt can establish a valid defense, such as the unintentional inability to obey the order, imprisonment is not proper.” (Emphasis supplied).”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Elzey v. Elzey · Garland v. Garland
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.