Burns v. Shepherd’s Empirical Analysis
1954
Citation profile
9 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 9 later decisions — most recently March 2001
9 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 Chicago Ry Co v. Nye-Schneider-Fowler Co · Non-Royalty Shoe Co. v. Phoenix Assurance Co. · State Board of Election Commissioners v. Coleman · Martin v. High Splint Coal Co. · Liberty Warehouse Co. v. Burley Tobacco Growers' Co-Operative Ass'n
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 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Unless based upon some unreasonable delay or willful failure of the employer, there could be no more constitutional justification for requiring the employer to pay all or part of the employee's attorney fee than to require payment of his grocery bill. Unless some standards are provided by which the requirement would apply only to employers who have unreasonably or willfully violated some obligation which they owe to an employee, we do not think the statute can be sustained as constitutional. It violates the due process clause of the Federal Constitution and Section 2 of the Kentucky Constitution which declares that absolute and arbitrary power exists nowhere in a republic.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““Throughout all of the cases is the fundamental principle that the imposition of the fees is justified solely on the ground that the person responsible for their payment has brought about the situation through which the fees are incurred by the willful violation of some statutory or contractual obligation. In the statute under consideration, no distinction is made between the just and the unjust. It applies with equal force to the employer who, without reasonable basis for his position, is trying to escape his statutory responsibility, and the employer who is neither seeking to avoid or delay payment of a valid claim asserted by the employee.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“the constitutionality of KRS 342.320(2), Acts of 1952, Chapter 182, § 12, under which an employer is required to pay one-half of the claimant's attorney fee in the case of an award by the Workmen's Compensation Board, growing out of injury or death of an employee.”
1 later decision 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.