Phillips's Estate’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

40 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 40 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “. . appellants’ counsel planted their claim for a reversal almost entirely upon the testimony of three doctors, who, on occasions running through a period of thirty or forty years, had been decedent’s attending physicians. “With one accord, they said decedent was not, in their opinion, competent to make a will, yet not one of them gave a legal reason for that conclusion. They gave no instance of a lack of business ability, which seemed to them, apparently, to be a matter of very little moment. Indeed, it would appear from a reading of their testimony, that because they thought decedent had paresis she must be incompetent, since, in their opinion, that was the medical conclusion regarding the disease, at least in its latest stage, and this though they admitted that people had carried on extensive businesses while so suffering.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Rash's Estate