Landress v. Phoenix Mut Life Ins Co’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

171 federal appellate · 33 district · 236 state decisions

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 537 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “When a man has died in such a way that his death is spoken of as an accident, he has died because of an accident, and hence by accidental means.”

   28 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Simpson Chambers v. Jefferson-Pilot Life Insurance Company · Gulf Life Insurance Company v. Nash

2. ““Petitioner argues that the death, resulting from voluntary exposure to the sun’s rays under normal conditions, was accidental in the common or popular sense of the term, and should therefore be held to be within the liability clauses of the policies. But it is not enough, to establish liability under these clauses, that the death or injury was accidental in the understanding of the average man — that the result of the exposure ‘was something unforeseen, unexpected, extraordinary, an unlooked-for mishap, and so an accident,’ see Lewis v. Ocean Accident & Guarantee Corp., 224 N.Y. 18 , 21, 120 N.E. 56 , 57, 7 A.L.R. 1129 ; see, also, Aetna Life Ins. Co. v. Portland Gas & Coke Co., 9 Cir., 229 F. 552 , L.R.A.1916D, 1027, for here the carefully chosen words defining liability distinguish between the result and the external means which produces it. The insurance is nob against an accidental result. The stipulated payments are to be made only if the bodily injury, though unforeseen, is effected by means which are external and accidental. The external means is stated to be the rays of the sun, to which the insured voluntarily exposed himself. Petitioner’s pleadings do not suggest that there was anything in the sun’s rays, the weather, or other circumstances external to the insured’s own body and operating to produce the unanticipated injury, which was unknown or unforeseen by the insured. “We do not intimate that injuries resulting from as impalpable a cause as the inadvertent intr”

   13 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Hartford Accident & Indemnity Co. v. Douglass · Sentinel Life Ins. v. Blackmer

3. “directly and independently of all other causes from bodily injuries effected through external, violent and accidental means, and not directly or indirectly, wholly or partly from disease or physical or mental infirmity.”

   11 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 26 Wash. 2d 594 - Evans v. Metropolitan Life Insurance · Brackman v. National Life Accident Ins. Co.