Hammonds v. Haven’s Empirical Analysis
1955
Citation profile
5 federal appellate · 13 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 19 later decisions — most recently April 1988
5 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 Brunk v. Hamilton-Brown Shoe Co. · Corbin v. Philadelphia · Rovinski v. Rowe · Ex Parte Hernreich v. Quinn · Alford v. Washington
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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Under what is commonly referred to as the rescue doctrine, conduct which might otherwise be considered contributory negligence may not be so considered where a person is injured in attempting to save others from imminent danger of personal injury or death. Persons are held justified in assuming greater risks in the protection of human life where they would not be under other circumstances. One is not guilty of contributory negligence in exposing himself to danger of injury in order to rescue another from imminent danger of personal injury or death if, under the same or similar circumstances, an ordinarily prudent person might so expose himself, or, as often expressed, if the act of intervention is not performed under such circumstances as would make it rash or reckless in the judgment of ordinarily prudent persons. This is true even though the person attempting to rescue knows that it involves a great hazard to himself without certainty of accomplishing the attempted rescue and even though in attempting such rescue he thereby imperils his own life.”
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.