Langever v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1925
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 13 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently August 2005
1 federal appellate · 13 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 Cotheal v. . Talmage · Krutz v. Robbins · Farrar v. Beeman · Gillespie v. Williams
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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““[I]n a case of a contract for the payment of money simply, a stipulation to pay a fixed sum, in default of performance, will be regarded as an agreement for a penalty and not as a covenant for liquidated damages — the reason for this rule being that, for the nonpayment of money, the law awards damages measured by interest, and hence there is no difficulty in ascertaining the damages in such a case.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“Any effort to establish the actual damages for a breach of a contract such as the one under consideration here would be attended with such unusual considerations and surrounded with such uncertainty and difficulties as to take the case out of the usual class of cases of mere default in the payment of money, and thus to afford fair grounds for sustaining an agreement for liquidated damages.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“Where it is certain that damages will flow, and where it is certain they cannot be accurately measured, or where it appears their ascertainment, if possible, will be difficult, the best reasons exist for respecting the agreement of the parties in advance upon a sum mutually satisfactory.”
1 later decision 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.