Baltimore Co v. Berry’s Empirical Analysis
286 U.S. 272 · 1932
Citation profile
15 federal appellate · 28 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 44 later decisions — most recently January 1969 · most notably Ramsouer v. Midland Valley R. (1943), Tatum v. Gulf, Mobile Ohio Railroad Co. (1949)
15 federal appellate · 28 state decisions — followed in 11 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 Koenig v. Flynn
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 44 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“There was no evidence that either the conductor or respondent knew that the caboose had stopped on the trestle, and, as they were together in the cupola of the caboose when the train stopped, their opportunity for knowledge, as each knew, was the same. Hence, there is no room for inference that the conductor was under a duty to warn of danger known to him and not to the respondent, or that respondent relied or had reason to rely on the conductor to give such warning. Nor was the request to alight a command to do so regardless of any danger reasonably discoverable by respondent. The conductor did not ask respondent to alight from the caboose rather than from one of the forward cars standing clear of the trestle, where it was safe, or to omit the precautions which a reasonable man would take to ascertain, by inspection, whether he could safely alight at the point chosen. There was no evidence that the respondent could not have discovered the danger by use of his lantern or by other reasonable precautions, or that he in fact made any effort to ascertain whether the place was one where he could safely alight. * * * If negligence caused the injury, it was exclusively that of the respondent. * * *”
2 later decisions 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.