Higgins v. Higgins’s Empirical Analysis
1979
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 9 later decisions — most recently September 2020
2 federal appellate · 6 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 49 Cal. 2d 210 - Spellens v. Spellens · Evatt v. Miller · Estes v. Merrill · Furth v. Furth · Cooper v. McCoy
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.
““... The theory is that the marriage is not made valid by reason of the estoppel but that the estopped person may not take a position that the divorce or latter marriage was invalid.... ‘To hold otherwise protects neither the welfare nor morals of society but, on the contrary, such holding [would be] a flagrant invitation to others to attempt to circumvent the law, cohabit in unlawful state, and when tired of such situation, apply to the courts for a release from the indicia of the marriage status’ ... [and] [f]rom a pragmatic viewpoint, judicial invalidation of irregular foreign divorces and attendant remarriages ... is a [wholly ineffective] sanction against an institution whose charm lies in its immediate respectability . . .. ””
2 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.