Cunningham v. Brown’s Empirical Analysis
265 U.S. 1 · 1924
Citation profile
306 federal appellate · 78 district · 75 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 939 later decisions (3 by the Supreme Court) — most recently September 2020 · most notably Stipcich v. Metropolitan Life Insurance (1928), Texas Pac Ry Co v. Pottorff (1934)
306 federal appellate · 78 district · 75 state decisions — followed in 15 states
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.
Appellate journey
reviewedLowell v. Brown (from First Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on National Bank v. Insurance Co. · Taubel-Scott-Kitzmiller Co. v. Fox · Richardson v. Shaw · Schuyler v. Littlefield
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 939 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“After August 2d the victims of Ponzi were not to be divided into two classes, those who rescinded for fraud and those who were relying on his contract to pay them. They were all of one class, actuated by the same purpose to save themselves from the effect of Ponzi’s insolvency. Whether they sought to rescind, or sought to get their money as by the terms of the contract, they were, in their inability to identify their payments, creditors, and nothing more. It is a case the circumstances of which call strongly for the principle that equality is equity, and this is the spirit of the bankrupt law.”
16 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[The recipient of the alleged preference] could have followed the money wherever they could trace it and have asserted possession of it on the ground that there was a resulting trust in their favor.... [This] they could do without violating any statutory rule against preference in bankruptcy, because they then would have been endeavoring to get their own money, and not money in the estate of the bankrupt. But to succeed they must trace the money, and therein they have failed.... In such a case, the defrauded lender becomes merely a creditor to the extent of his loss and a payment to him by the bankrupt within the prescribed period ... is a preference.”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“a Ponzi scheme ... is, as a matter of law, insolvent from its inception”) (citing Cunningham v. Brown, 265 U.S. 1 , 8, 44 S.Ct. 424 , 68 L.Ed. 873 (1924) (“[Charles Ponzi] was always insolvent, and became daily more so, the more his business succeeded. He made no investments of any kind, so that all the money he had at any time was solely the result of loans by his dupes.”)). 4 . Under FUFTA, a “creditor'' is simply”
3 later decisions 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.