Mitchell v. Couch’s Empirical Analysis
1955
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 1 district · 45 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 57 later decisions — most recently January 2016 · most notably Summerfield v. Superior Court, Maricopa Cty. (1985), Smith v. Brennan (1960)
6 federal appellate · 1 district · 45 state decisions — followed in 25 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 Woods v. Lancet · Verkennes v. Corniea · Dietrich v. Inhabitants of Northampton · Steggall Ex Rel. Stegall v. Morris · Drobner v. . Peters
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 57 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[a] fetus generally becomes a viable child between the sixth and seventh month of its existence, although there are instances of younger infants being born and”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage“when a pregnant woman is injured through negligence and the child, if it be a viable infant ..., suffers death as a consequence, a right of recovery exists to the personal representative....”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““All writers who have discussed the problem have joined in condemning the old rule, in maintaining that the unborn child in the path of an automobile is as much a person in the street as the mother, and in urging that recovery should be allowed upon proper proof. “This criticism has at last had its effect. Beginning with a decision in the District of Columbia in 1946, a series of cases, many of them overruling former holdings, have held that an infant bom alive may maintain an action for prenatal injuries, and that an action for wrongful death will lie where it dies as a result of such injuries after birth. The reversal is so definite and marked as to leave no doubt that this will be the law of the future in the United States.””
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.