Levitch v. Levitch’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 99 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 103 later decisions — most recently March 2019 · most notably Marshall v. Miller (1981), River Birch Associates v. City of Raleigh (1990)
1 federal appellate · 99 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 Bunn v. Bunn · Holden v. Holden · Mitchell v. Mitchell · Yount v. Lowe · Stanley v. . Stanley
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 103 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“. . . Consent judgments for the payment of subsistence to the wife are of two kinds. In one, the court merely approves or sanctions the payments which the husband has agreed to make for the wife’s support and sets them out in a judgment against him. Such a judgment constitutes nothing more than a contract between the parties made with the approval of the court. Since the court itself does not in such case order the payments, the amount specified therein is not technically alimony. In the other, the court adopts the agreement of the parties as its own determination of their respective rights and obligations and orders the husband to pay the specified amounts as alimony. A contract-judgment of the first type is enforceable only as an ordinary contract. It may not be enforced by contempt proceedings and, insofar as it fixes the amount of support for the wife, it cannot be changed or set aside except with the consent of both parties in the absence of a finding that the agreement was unfair to the wife or that her consent was obtained by fraud or mutual mistake. . . . A judgment of the second type, being an order of the court, may be modified by the court at any time changed conditions make a modification right and proper. The fact that the parties have agreed and consented to the amount of the alimony decreed by the court does not take away its power to modify the award or to enforce it by attachment for contempt should the husband wilfully fail to pay it. (Citations.) Alimony is”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“In the instant case, the Court expressly stated that it Ordered, Adjudged and Decreed that the Separation Agreement heretofore entered into by the parties ... be . . . incorporated by reference in this Judgment. Defendant contends that since the court failed to expressly state that the alimony provided for in the agreement was ordered to be paid, this was a mere approval of the agreement, rather than an adoption of it into the judgment. The incorporation language here, however, appears sufficiently compelling to indicate an intent on the part of the court to order payment of the alimony. Indeed, in the usual case in which we have found approval rather than adoption, the Court has stated merely that the agreement was approved, reviewed the subject matter of the agreement in narrative form without further order, or expressly excluded the agreement from any prejudice under the terms of the judgment. [Citations omitted.]”
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.