First Nat Bank Trust Co of Bridgeport Conn v. Beach’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

64 federal appellate · 15 district · 15 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 128 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““1. Beach, the respondent, must be held, when the facts are viewed in combination, to have been ‘personally’ and ‘primarily’ engaged in farming operations. “* * * He was in direct or personal possession of forty-eight acres, one-fourth of the large farm which had been in his family for years. A substantial part of this acreage he cultivated with his own labor, or applied, again with his own labor, to other agricultural uses. * * * The critical fact is that the debtor worked an acreage large enough to count, that he did not work at anything else, and that he gave to this work, whether profitable or unprofitable, ‘the major portion of his time.’ ””

   3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Shyvers v. Security-First Nat. Bank of Los Angeles. · Hamburg Bank v. Kitchens

2. ““His rentals like his labor smacked of the soil, and made him hot less, but more a farmer than he would have been without them. How the case would stand if he had been a merchant or a doctor and had leased a tract of farming land to tenants, we do not have to say. What has happened here is different. The farming and the leasing must be viewed in combination if we are to gain a true perspective, the two tied together as principal and incident. A single tract of land belonging to the debtor has been worked by him in part, and in part worked by others to whom a section of the tract has been let for cultivation. Far from stepping into another business, he has been faithful to the old one in thus dividing up the tillage. To get a living out of the land in one way or another is the thread of common purpose that binds the labor and the leases, and enables us to find in them the tokens of the same vocation. In brief the man is seen to be a farmer by every test of common speech, though his income has been garnered in rents as well as products. We emphasize the fact afresh that the words of the statute to which meaning is to be given are not phrases of art with a changeless connotation. They have a color and a content that may vary with the setting. * * * In the setting of this enterprise, the totality of its circumstances, the roots of the respondent’s income go down into the soil.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Federal Land Bank v. Wood

3. ““We do not try to fix the meaning of either of the two branches of this definition, considered in the abstract. The two are not equivalents. They were used by way of contrast. Occasions must have been in view when the receipt of income derived from farming operations would make a farmer out of some one who personally or primarily was engaged in different activities. A catalogue of such occasions might err for excess or for defect if made up in advance. Hypothetical situations are laid before us, and the argument is pressed that the definition will breed absurdity if applied to this one of them or that. We refuse to be led away from the limitations of the concrete case. The words ‘primarily engaged,’ as we find them in the first branch of the definition, do not constitute a term of art. The words ‘income derived from farming operations’ do not constitute such a term. In every case the totality of the facts is to be considered and appraised.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Federal Land Bank v. Wood