Ellis v. Union Pacific Railroad’s Empirical Analysis
329 U.S. 649 · 1947
Citation profile
281 federal appellate · 12 district · 251 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 664 later decisions (50 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2021 · most notably The Boeing Company v. Daniel C. Shipman (1969), Urie v. Thompson (1949)
281 federal appellate · 12 district · 251 state decisions — followed in 30 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.
Relationships
Relies on Lavender v. Kurn · Tennant v. Peoria & Pekin Union Railway Co. · Brady v. Southern Railway Co. · Tiller v. Atlantic Coast Line Railroad · Bailey v. Central Vermont Railway, Inc.
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 664 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“does not make the employer the insurer of the safety of his employees while they are on duty. The basis of his liability is his negligence, not the fact that injuries occur.”
28 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““From this evidence the jury might have concluded that petitioner had a safe place to work but elected to choose a dangerous one, that any duty of warning was fully discharged by the presence of the sign, and that the engineer had not been negligent in any way. In that view of the case the accident would be an unforseeable, freak event or one caused solely by petitioner’s own negligence. On the other hand, it would not have been unreasonable for the triers of fact to have inferred that it was proper and usual procedure to work on the right side of the engine, that the hazard was not readily apparent and was almost in the nature of a trap, that while the sign was placed so as to be readily visible from a train, it was insufficient warning to a man on the ground, and that consequently petitioner was not furnished a safe place to work. And the jury might have thought that the engineer was negligent in failing to perceive the peril in time to avert the accident by a warning or by stopping the engine. Again, both parties might have been found negligent, in which event it would have been the duty of the jury, as the trial judge charged, to render a verdict based upon the damages caused by respondent’s negligence diminished by the proportion of negligence attributable to petitioner.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“for insufficiency of evidence to show negligence,”
1 later decision 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.