Matthews v. Matthews’s Empirical Analysis
1973
Citation profile
16 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently October 2008
16 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 Karrell v. United States · Bradley v. United States · Van Antwerp v. Van Antwerp · Grayson v. Muckleroy · Barnes v. Starr
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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"[She] who comes into equity must come with clean hands is one of the recognized maxims in equity. We think it is applicable here. This question is not raised in brief, but the maxim of unclean hands may be applied by the court sua sponte whether the question was raised in the lower court or not."”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“"`. . . If men in consummation of frauds, employ instruments, binding and conclusive in their legal operation and effect, it is sound reason, good policy, sheer justice, to leave them where they have placed themselves, bound as they have bound themselves, without assistance from the courts to unlose them, when it becomes their interest to be unloosed, encouraging them and others to commit similar fraud.' . . . Here, an equitable trust is sought to be raised, and is by the contention of the appellant, declared to arise out of a transaction confessedly actually fraudulent. . . . But, the rule is of universal recognition that a court of equity will never imply or enforce a trust, springing out of a transaction, in which the party seeking to enforce it, has been guilty of fraud and immoral conduct."”
1 later decision quote this exact passage““Where a decree is a single unit and is erroneous in any respect, the error infects the entire decree and an assignment of error in general terms is sufficient to invite review. * * * ” Powell v. Powell, 285 Ala. 230, 233 , 231 So.2d 103, 105 . See also Auto-Owners Insurance Co. v. Stokes, 284 Ala. 537, 545 , 226 So.2d 320 ; Wiggins v. Stapleton Baptist Church, 282 Ala. 255 , 210 So.2d 814 ; Bryan v. W. T. Smith Lumber Co., 278 Ala. 538 , 179 So.2d 287 ; Matthews v. Matthews, 292 Ala. 1 , 288 So.2d 110, 115 ; Robinson v. Murphy, 69 Ala. 543, 545 .”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Aldridge v. Grund
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.