Rizzo v. Cunningham’s Empirical Analysis
1939
Citation profile
20 federal appellate · 2 district · 60 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 84 later decisions — most recently June 2016 · most notably Boston Five Cents Savings Bank v. Secretary of the Department of Housing & Urban Development (1985), RCI Northeast Services Division v. Boston Edison Co. (1987)
20 federal appellate · 2 district · 60 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 Thibeault v. Poole · Noyes v. Noyes · Dixon v. Lamson · Keenan v. E. M. Loew's, Inc. · Noyes v. Noyes
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 84 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“This evidence is not received for the purpose of constructing a new contract or varying the old one, ... but is to enable the judge to understand the subject matter of the agreement as it lay in the minds of the parties and the meaning that they themselves put upon any doubtful or ambiguous terms they may have used, and so to apply their language correctly to the subject matter which was in their contemplation.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Clevenger v. Haling“the conversation upon which the jury was permitted to find an agreement ... was not too vague and indefinite to form the basis for a contract.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“where a contract is oral, the question of what the contract is must, if controverted, be tried by a jury as a question of fact....”
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.