Wright v. Straessley’s Empirical Analysis
1935
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 31 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 35 later decisions — most recently December 1972 · most notably Lanni v. Pennsylvania Railroad (1952), Miller v. Hickey (1951)
2 federal appellate · 31 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 Shafer v. Lacock, Hawthorn & Co. · Durning v. Hyman · Henes v. McGovern · Maerkle v. Pittsburgh Railways Co. · Gawronski v. McAdoo
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 35 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The burden of proof is never on the defendant in a case of this kind. Under certain circumstances the burden of coming forward with evidence may shift to the defendant but that is an entirely different matter from `burden of proof'. . . . There is a class of cases in which accidents are attended by circumstances from which the inference of negligence is legitimate. But in such cases negligence is not a presumption of law. . . . Negligence cannot be presumed from the mere fact of the happening of an accident, but it may be inferred from the attendant circumstances. Juries should be instructed that the burden of proving negligence is on him or her who asserts it, and that a defendant is not called upon to come forward with countervailing evidence until the plaintiff has established negligence by direct or circumstantial proof.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Miller v. Hickey
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.