O'Brien v. O'Brien’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

55 state decisions

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 55 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “A party to a court proceeding must obey the court's orders unless and until they are modified or rescinded, and may not engage in self-help by disobeying a court order to achieve the party's desired end.... "The court has an array of tools available to it to enforce its orders, the most prominent being its contempt power. Our law recognizes two broad types of contempt: criminal and civil.... The two are distinguished by the type of penalty imposed.... "To impose contempt penalties, whether criminal or civil, the trial court must make a contempt finding, and this requires the court to find that the offending party wilfully violated the court's order; failure to comply with an order, alone, will not support a finding of contempt.... Rather, to constitute contempt, a party's conduct must be wilful.... A good faith dispute or legitimate misunderstanding about the mandates of an order may well preclude a finding of wilfulness.... Whether a party's violation was wilful depends on the circumstances of the particular case and, ultimately, is a factual question committed to the sound discretion of the trial court.... Without a finding of wilfulness, a trial court cannot find contempt and, it follows, cannot impose contempt penalties.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. 182 Conn. App. 736 - Hall v. Hall · 187 Conn. App. 604 - Town of Wethersfield v. PR Arrow, LLC

2. “[c]ourts have in general the power to fashion a remedy appropriate to the vindication of a prior ... judgment.... Having found noncompliance, the court, in the exercise of its equitable powers, necessarily ha[s] the authority to fashion whatever orders [are] required to protect the integrity of [its original] judgment.... This is so because [i]n a contempt proceeding, even in the absence of a finding of contempt , a trial court has broad discretion to make whole a party who has suffered as a result of another party's failure to comply with the court order.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. 188 Conn. App. 574 - Nappo v. Nappo · 188 Conn. App. 53 - Wolyniec v. Wolyniec

3. “[a] party to a court proceeding must obey the court's orders unless and until they are modified or rescinded, and may not engage in 'self-help' by disobeying a court order to achieve the party's desired end”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. 182 Conn. App. 736 - Hall v. Hall · 188 Conn. App. 53 - Wolyniec v. Wolyniec