Sears v. Childs’s Empirical Analysis
1941
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 23 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 29 later decisions — most recently December 2013 · most notably Hinckley v. Town of Barnstable (1942), Shawmut Bank, N.A. v. Buckley (1996)
2 federal appellate · 23 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 Dumaine v. Dumaine · Attorney General v. City of Methuen · Owen v. Field · McShane v. Cannon · Brennan v. Brennan
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 29 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The^ word 'provided’ in common speech naturally expresses a qualification, limitation, condition, or an exception respecting the scope and operation of words previously used. ‘Although a proviso in statutes, contracts or wills not infrequently introduces new or independent matter, its true office and its general purpose is to restrict the sense or make clear the meaning of that which has gone before.’ ””
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.