Fleming v. Dane’s Empirical Analysis
1939
Citation profile
9 federal appellate · 32 district · 36 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 87 later decisions — most recently January 2025 · most notably Carroll v. Xerox Corp. (2002), Aetna Casualty Surety Co. v. P & B Autobody (1994)
9 federal appellate · 32 district · 36 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 Dickerman v. Northern Trust Co. · Pickett v. Walsh · Sandler v. Silk · DesLauries v. Shea · Willett v. Herrick
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 87 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"From the general structure of the declaration, as well as from its allegations of power and influence on the part of the individual defendants, it would seem that this declaration was intended to state a cause of action for true conspiracy, that is to say a cause of action which involves more than a mere joint tort and the gist of which consists in the combination itself making unlawful a course of conduct that might not give rise to liability if carried on by a single individual. The attempt is to state a case like Willett v. Herrick, 242 Mass. 471 , 136 N.E. 366 . * * * The controlling proposition of law was recently stated by this court in DesLauries v. Shea, [300] Mass. [30], 13 N.E.2d 932, 935 , in these words, `There can be no independent tort for conspiracy unless in a situation "where mere force of numbers acting in unison or other exceptional circumstances may make a wrong." * * * And in order to prove an independent tort for conspiracy upon the basis of "mere force of numbers acting in unison," it must be shown that there was some "peculiar power of coercion of the plaintiff possessed by the defendants in combination which any individual standing in a like relation to the plaintiff would not have had."' The most common illustration of such a `conspiracy' is to be found in the combined action of groups of employers or employees, where through the power of combination pressure is created and results brought about different in kind from anything that could have been a”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage“); Neustadt v. Employers' Liability Assurance Corp., Ltd., 303 Mass. 321, 325 (1939), quoting Caverno v. Fellows, 286 Mass. 440, 444 (1934) (“[t]here can be no independent tort for conspiracy unless in a situation”
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.