Smith v. Watner’s Empirical Analysis
1970
Citation profile
11 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently December 2010
11 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 Brashears v. Collison · Berman v. Leckner · Thomas v. Hardisty · Hauver v. Dorsey · Master v. Master
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 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The order of publication was in no way constructive notice to the wife. A proceeding to foreclose an equity of redemption in a tax sale is a proceeding in rem or quasi in rem and the Legislature, without affronting due process, could have provided that all interested parties, including residents, were to be brought before the court by publication. ... The Legislature, however, chose to require in Code (1957), Art. 81, Secs. 106 and 107, that residents of the State must be personally served by subpoenas and that only if there were returns of non est on two successive subpoenas against a named resident defendant, or one non est and an affidavit of evasion of service, could such a defendant be treated as a nonresident and served by publication. Since the wife was admittedly a resident, living at an address known to the complainants, and was not served, the court had neither the right nor the power to proceed against her interest in the property, and the order of publication was without effect as to it.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority““A failure to provide such notice or to make a good faith effort to do so may not amount to actual fraud in that one may not have been compelled by malicious motives to deceive the defendant, but it does, in any event, amount to constructive fraud since Jannenga, regardless of moral guilt or intent to deceive, failed to perform a legal duty. The Court in Hauver did not pass upon the issue of constructive fraud present in the case at bar.””
1 later decision 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.