Ellis v. Secor’s Empirical Analysis
1875
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 37 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 40 later decisions — most recently December 1977 · most notably Devol v. Dye (1890), Love v. Francis (1886)
2 federal appellate · 37 state decisions — followed in 14 states
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.
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.
““It is the duty of courts to enforce all lawful rights, so as to carry out the intention of the parties. That intention should always be observed if lawfully expressed; and it is only incumbent on legal tribunals to be very careful to ascertain the facts. There is much room for frauds and mistakes in cases of this kind, and, therefore, care should be used to sift the evidence. But where there is no doubt about the facts, it would be a legal wrong and gross injustice to refuse to act upon them fairly and without hesitation.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. MacKenzie v. Steeves
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.