Campbell v. Wadsworth’s Empirical Analysis
248 U.S. 169 · 1918
Citation profile
15 federal appellate · 8 district · 14 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 48 later decisions (10 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 1977 · most notably In re East River Towing Co. (1924), Grayson v. Harris (1925)
15 federal appellate · 8 district · 14 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedWadsworth v. Crump
Relationships
Relies on Washington v. Miller · United States v. Bessie Wildcat · Daniel McDougal v. Edmond McKay
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 48 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The Supreme Court [of Oklahoma] also says that only ‘the most powerful and impelling reasons’ could induce it to hold that it was the intention of the Indians to exclude their own children from participation in the distribution of their property after death. While it is true that it seems unnatural for the Indians to have preferred more distant relatives to their own children in providing for the descent and distribution of their propei'ty, yet from the terms of the aet before us, and also from the provisions of the Supplemental Creek Agreement that ‘only citizens of the Creek Nation, male and female, and their Creek descendants shall inherit lands of the Creek Nation’ ( 32 Stat. 500 ), it is clear that with the Indians the interests of the tribe were paramount to those of the family and it was with a knowledge of the mode of life of their primitive people, better and more intimate than the courts can now command, that they determined that this paramount purpose would best be served by giving to children bom of mixed marriages the tribal status of their mother. * * * “All statutes of descent and distribution are arbitrary expressions of the purpose of the lawmaking power; and that the provisions of such a statute do not happen to meet the notions of justice of a court is not sufficient reason for indulging in an interpretation which modifies their plain and unambiguous terms. Especially is this true of these Indian statutes which are a progressive development, embodying conc”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““Provided, that only citizens of the Creek Nation, male and female, and their Creek descendants shall inherit lands of the Creek Nation.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Grayson v. Harris · Coker v. Howard
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.