Wichers v. Hatch’s Empirical Analysis
2000
Citation profile
159 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 159 later decisions — most recently January 2024 · most notably State v. Griffin (2000), Mahon v. B v. Unitron Manufacturing, Inc. (2007)
159 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 Mather v. Griffin Hospital · Birgel v. Heintz · Childs v. Bainer · Palomba v. Gray · Malmberg v. Lopez
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 159 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A conclusion that the jury exercised merely poor judgment is likewise insufficient. . . . The ultimate test which must be applied to the verdict by the trial court is whether the jury's award falls somewhere within the necessarily uncertain limits of just damages or whether the size of the verdict so shocks the sense of justice as to compel the conclusion that the jury were influenced by partiality, prejudice, mistake or corruption.”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage“Under Wichers , [r]ather than decide that an award of only economic damages is inadequate as a matter of law, the jury's decision to award economic damages and zero noneconomic damages is best tested in light of the circumstances of the particular case before it. Accordingly, the trial court should examine the evidence to decide whether the jury reasonably could have found that the plaintiff had failed in his proof of the issue. That decision should be made, not on the assumption that the jury made a mistake, but, rather, on the supposition that the jury did exactly what it intended to do....”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage“[I]f there is a reasonable basis in the evidence for the jury's verdict, unless there is a mistake in law or some other valid basis for upsetting the result other than a difference of opinion regarding the conclusions to be drawn from the evidence, the trial court should let the jury work their will.”
6 later decisions 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.