May v. Kelly’s Empirical Analysis
1855
Citation profile
7 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 7 later decisions — most recently December 1927
7 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 7 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Bell may have been the agent of the owner of the steamboat, and the agent of the defendant, and yet have had no authority to accept any bill for the defendant. It was not enough to aver that Bell was the agent of the defendant. It was incumbent on the plaintiffs to know the extent and nature of his authority as agent, or, at all events, to have alleged that his agency embraced or authorized the acceptance of the bill.””
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.