Special Equipment Co. v. Coe’s Empirical Analysis
324 U.S. 370 · 1945
Citation profile
43 federal appellate · 16 district · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 141 later decisions (12 by the Supreme Court) — most recently September 2023 · most notably Aro Manufacturing Co. v. Convertible Top Replacement Co. (1961), Scott Paper Co. v. Marcalus Manufacturing Co. (1945)
43 federal appellate · 16 district · 1 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedSpecial Equipment Co. v. Coe (from District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Continental Paper Bag Company v. Eastern Paper Bag Company · Mercoid Corporation v. Mid-Continent Inv Co · Morton Salt Co. v. G. S. Suppiger Co. · Motion Picture Patents Company v. Universal Film Manufacturing Company · Seymour v. Osborne
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 141 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The patent grant is not of a right to the patentee to use the invention, for that he already possesses. It is a grant of the right to exclude others from using it * * *. By the very terms of the statute the grant is nothing more than a means of preventing others, except under license from the patentee, from appropriating his invention.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Hess v. Petrillo“the exclusive right to make, use, and vend the invention or discovery.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.