Comstock v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1873
Citation profile
12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently December 1936
12 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.
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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““There are no technical rules which regulate the form for exhibiting claims in the probate court, or for framing issues for their trial on appeal, and it is not desirable that there should be. Substance is more regarded than form in such cases, and the simpler the statement the better, if sufficient to apprise the court and parties interested of the real claim. The highly artificial rules of common-law pleading have no proper application, and it must frequently occur that the forms of declarations in actions ex contractu cannot be conveniently employed at all. The true subject of dispute should clearly appear, and, where this is the case, the form is of little consequence.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. King v. Brewer
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.