Ward v. Ochoa’s Empirical Analysis
1973
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 70 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 76 later decisions — most recently August 2014 · most notably General Motors Corp. v. Lahocki (1980), Elbaor v. Smith (1993)
3 federal appellate · 70 state decisions — followed in 24 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.
Relationships
Relies on 280 So. 2d 431 - Hoffman v. Jones · Booth v. Mary Carter Paint Company · Lum v. Stinnett · Maule Industries, Inc. v. Rountree · Bill Currie Ford, Inc. v. Cash
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 76 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“" 'In essence, a Mary Carter agreement is a contract by which one or more defendants in a multi-party case secretly align themselves with the plaintiff and agree to continue as active defendants in the suit while working to aid in the plaintiffs case; in exchange, their own maximum liability will be diminished proportionately by increasing the liability of the non-agreeing defendant or defendants!.]’ ””
25 later decisions quote this exact passage“"In any full consideration of the degrees of liability of the parties involved in a single accident, it now seems essential to a complete disposition of the relative claims, that we remove the limitation imposed by the rule against the division of liability among joint tortfeasors. A further reason supporting such discontinuance of the rule, in view of the change in the law, is the fact that in most instances tortfeasors are financially reliable through insurance coverage. This fact eliminates one of the basic reasons for the rule which was to insure a full recovery by an injured party, no matter against which one he had to go for how much. "In the present posture of the matter, for `equal justice' on a comparative basis, any involved party should be brought into the matter in such position as he actually appears, and the limitation on our own Florida third party practice which stands in the way of this should be revamped accordingly. To continue without this completion of the change over to comparative negligence, is to allow what was a well-intended joint tortfeasor rule to be used unfairly as a tool to avoid complete justice. The object is to have a full and fair evaluation by the jury of the extent of each party's actual liability."”
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.