Bunn v. Bunn’s Empirical Analysis
1964
Citation profile
129 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 132 later decisions — most recently December 2015 · most notably White v. White (1979), Francis v. Francis (1967)
129 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 Fuchs v. Fuchs · Holden v. Holden · Keen v. . Parker · Briggs v. Briggs · Stanley v. . Stanley
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 132 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“. . . Consent judgments for the payment of subsistence to the wife are of two kinds. In one, the court merely approves or sanctions the payments which the husband has agreed to make for the wife’s support and sets them out in a judgment against him. Such a judgment constitutes nothing more than a contract between the parties made with the approval of the court. Since the court itself does not in such case order the payments, the amount specified therein is not technically alimony. In the other, the court adopts the agreement of the parties as its own determination of their respective rights and obligations and orders the husband to pay the specified amounts as alimony. A contract-judgment of the first type is enforceable only as an ordinary contract. It may not be enforced by contempt proceedings and, insofar as it fixes the amount of support for the wife, it cannot be changed or set aside except with the consent of both parties in the absence of a finding that the agreement was unfair to the wife or that her consent was obtained by fraud or mutual mistake. . . . A judgment of the second type, being an order of the court, may be modified by the court at any time changed conditions make a modification right and proper. The fact that the parties have agreed and consented to the amount of the alimony decreed by the court does not take away its power to modify the award or to enforce it by attachment for contempt should the husband wilfully fail to pay it. (Citations.) Alimony is”
10 later decisions quote this exact passage“[A]n agreement for the division of property rights and an order for the payment of alimony may be included as separable provisions in a consent judgment. In such event the division of property would be beyond the power of the court to change, but the order for future installments of alimony would be subject to modification in a proper case. Briggs v. Briggs, 178 Or. 193 , 165 P.2d 772 , 166 A.L.R. 666 . However, if the support provision and the division of property constitute a reciprocal consideration so that the entire agreement would be destroyed by a modification of the support provision, they are not separable and may not be changed without the consent of both parties. 2 A Nelson on Divorce and Alimony (2d Ed.Rev.) § 17.03; Annot., 166 A.L.R. 693 -701.”
8 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.