Blondel v. Hays’s Empirical Analysis
1991
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 59 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 72 later decisions — most recently December 2015 · most notably Kilpatrick v. Bryant (1993), 42 Va. App. 739 - Seaton v. Commonwealth (2004)
3 federal appellate · 59 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 Tilton v. Missouri Pacific Railroad · Hicks v. United States · Thompson v. Sun City Community Hospital, Inc. · Brown v. Koulizakis · Hadeed v. Medic-24, Ltd.
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 72 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[wjhen a physician’s or surgeon’s negligent action or inaction has effectively terminated a person’s chance of survival, he will not be permitted to raise conjectures as to possible chances for survival that he has put beyond realization. If there was any substantial possibility of survival and the defendant has destroyed it, he is answerable. Rarely is it possible to demonstrate to an absolute certainty what would have happened if certain actions had been taken. The law does not in all circumstances require a plaintiff to show to a certainty that a patient would have lived had he been operated on promptly.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“a decisional standard for the guidance of trial courts in deciding a motion to strike the evidence. It teaches, in short, that if a plaintiff’s evidence has shown that the defendant’s negligence has destroyed any substantial possibility of the patient’s survival, then there is sufficient evidence of proximate cause to go to the jury, and a motion to strike the evidence on that ground should be overruled.”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“indiscriminate use of language from appellate opinions in a jury instruction”
2 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.