Tiller v. Atlantic Coast Line Railroad’s Empirical Analysis
318 U.S. 54 · 1943
Citation profile
618 federal appellate · 30 district · 670 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,636 later decisions (88 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2021 · most notably Urie v. Thompson (1949), Rogers v. Missouri Pacific Railroad (1957)
618 federal appellate · 30 district · 670 state decisions — followed in 40 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedTiller v. Atlantic Coast Line R. (from Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Grand Trunk Ry Co of Canada v. Ives · Seaboard Air Line Railway v. Horton · Hough v. Railway Co. · Washington Co v. McDade
Cited together with Bailey v. Central Vermont Railway, Inc. · Lavender v. Kurn · Tennant v. Peoria & Pekin Union Railway Co. · Wilkerson v. McCarthy · Rogers v. Missouri Pacific Railroad
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 1,636 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas.”
16 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence““We hold that every vestige of the doctrine of assumption of risk was obliterated from the law by the 1939 amendment, and that Congress, by abolishing the defense of assumption of risk in that statute, did not mean to leave open the identical defense for the master by changing its name to ‘non-negligence’. As this Court said in facing the hazy margin between negligence and assumption of risk as involved in the Safety Appliance Act of 1893, 45 U.S.C.A. § 1 et seq., ‘Unless great care be taken, the servant’s rights will be sacrificed by simply charging him with assumption of the risk under another name;’ and no such result can be permitted 'here.””
15 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Assumption of risk is a judicially created rule which was developed in response to the general impulse of common law courts at the beginning of this period [the industrial revolution] to insulate the employer as much as possible from bearing the “human overhead” which is an inevitable part of the cost — to someone— of the doing of industrialized business. The general purpose behind this development in the common law seems to have been to give maximum freedom to expanding industry.”
14 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.