Dawson v. Gerritsen’s Empirical Analysis
1986
Citation profile
21 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 21 later decisions — most recently June 2003
21 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 Rawls v. State · Gay v. Rabon · Hogan v. Bright · McDonald v. Bowen · Stafford v. City of Hot Springs
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 21 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(a) No action for medical injury shall be commenced until at least sixty (60) days after service upon the person or persons alleged to be liable, by certified or registered mail to the last known address of the person or persons allegedly liable, of a written notice of the alleged injuries and the damages claimed. (b) If the notice is served within sixty (60) days of the expiration of the period for bringing suit described in § 16-114-203, the time for commencement of the action shall be extended seventy (70) days from the service of the notice.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Weidrick v. Arnold · Hailey v. Kemp“That may be true, so far as it goes, but we decline to rewrite the statute in that fashion, for two reasons. The statute is plainly intended to give the defendant or defendants in malpractice cases sixty days notice before being sued, for whatever functional use may be made of that information, the obvious rationale being that if a claim can be compromised before suit is filed, publicity adverse to the defendant is thereby averted. Whether the notice provision effectively serves that objective is not ours to judge, but we are persuaded that appellant’s proposed alternative of suing twice, the first suit serving as notice of an intent to file the second suit, hardly comports with either the letter or the spirit of the statutory scheme. The end result is that a defendant, instead of receiving the sixty day notice prior to any suit being filed, is sued twice without receiving written notice in advance of either suit. Secondly, the filing of a complaint followed by a voluntary nonsuit is, at best, ambiguous. Taken alone, they tell the putative defendant nothing other than that a claim potentially exists. They are not the explicit notice that a suit will be filed which the statute clearly contemplates.”
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.