Bensman v. Reed’s Empirical Analysis
1939
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 34 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 41 later decisions — most recently August 2019 · most notably 165 Ill. 2d 181 - Zedella v. Gibson (1995), 55 Ill. App. 3d 959 - Rosenberg v. Packerland Packing Co. (1977)
3 federal appellate · 34 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 Libby, McNeill & Libby v. Cook · Blumb v. Getz · Arkin v. Page · Crowell v. Duncan · Mitchell v. Churches
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 41 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““If an incompetent or reckless driver while driving the automobile of another for his own purposes commits an act that causes the automobile to damage another, the action or movement or the failure to act that caused the automobile to commit the injury was the act of the driver, but the owner’s permission for the incompetent driver to drive his automobile supplied the instrumentality, use of which combined with the negligent act of the driver caused the injury. The permission of the owner sets in motion one of the agencies which makes possible the commission of the negligent act. There is a well founded principle of law that an owner of property has a duty to use his property so as not to injure another and it is but a sequence of that rule that places the duty upon the owner to deny permission to another to drive his automobile for his own purposes when he knows such person is an incompetent or reckless driver or by the exercise of reasonable diligence he could have known of such incompetency or recklessness. # # # The liability of the owner does not arise by merely proving that he gave permission to an incompetent driver to drive his automobile but it must also appear that the incompetency alleged was the proximate cause of the commission of the negligent act which caused the injury. In this case the incompetency alleged is John’s defective vision and as one of the elements of a cause of action it was incumbent upon plaintiff to prove that John’s negligent act in the manage”
4 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.