Howell v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1962
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 46 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 51 later decisions — most recently February 2020 · most notably Root v. Allstate Insurance Company (1968), Normile v. Miller (1985)
3 federal appellate · 46 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 Walston v. R. B. Whitley & Co. · Jackson v. Bobbitt · Nix v. English · Prince v. . McRae · N. & W. Overall Co. v. Holmes
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 51 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““ 'A contract, express or implied, executed or executory, results from the concurrence of minds of two or more persons, and its legal consequences are not dependent upon the impressions or understandings of one alone of the parties to it. It is not what either thinks, but what both agree.’ Prince v. McRae, 84 N.C. 674 ; Overall Co. v. Holmes, 186 N.C. 428 , 119 S.E. 817 , and cases cited; Jackson v. Bobbitt, 253 N.C. 670, 677 , 117 S.E. 2d 806 . “ ‘. . . The undisclosed intention is immaterial in the absence of mistake, fraud, and the like, and the law imputes to a person an intention corresponding to the reasonable meaning of his words and acts. the test of the true interpretation of an offer or acceptance is not what the party making it thought it meant or intended it to mean, but what a reasonable person in the position of the parties would have thought it meant.” Williston on Contracts, Third Edition, Yol. 1, § 94.’ ””
4 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.