Dick v. Higgason’s Empirical Analysis
1959
Citation profile
5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently April 2002
5 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 Milwaukee and Saint Paul Railway Company v. Kellogg · Kuhns v. Brugger · Stephens v. Stephens · Jones Savage Lumber Company v. Thompson · Coca Cola Bottling Works of Lexington v. Bingham
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 5 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““It cannot be said an unloaded weapon is dangerous in a comparable way, even if it is out in the open in a room. Both the rifles were left in a harmless state by Dick in his private office behind his desk. James Mercer was therefore compelled to rummage through the desk drawers to secure the very things, namely, the cartridges, that would convert the rifle into an instrumentality fraught with peril. . . . When he rendered the rifles harmless in every ordinary sense by removing the cartridges from their chambers and then placing them in a box in the rear part of his desk drawer, no duty thereafter was imposed upon him to anticipate that someone would go into his desk by stealth, ransack it in order to abstract the cartridges therefrom and thereafter take one of the weapons and in its use accidentally shoot a bullet into the body of a man working near by.” 322 S.W.2d at pp. 94, 95.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage““In determining the proximate cause of an injury growing out of an act of negligence, the rule is the injury must be the natural and probable consequence of the act of negligence; that is, such a consequence as under the surrounding circumstances of the case might and ought to be foreseen by the wrongdoer as likely to flow from his act.” 322 S.W.2d at p. 94 .”
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.