Null v. Staiger’s Empirical Analysis
1939
Citation profile
2 district · 21 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 25 later decisions — most recently November 1977 · most notably Peoples Natural Gas Co. Appeal (1960), Brown v. Hughes (1955)
2 district · 21 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 United States v. Kirby · Orlosky v. Haskell · Fazio v. Pittsburgh Railways Company · Williams Et Ux. v. Meredith · Heaney v. Mauch Chunk Boro. (Et Al.)
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 25 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““In Null v. Staiger, 333 Pa. 370, 375 , 4 A. 2d 883 , the Supreme Court quoted from Endlich on the Interpretation of Statutes, sec. 258: ‘ “It is obvious that the administration of justice requires something more than the mere application of the letter of the law, designed for some particular class of ordinary cases, to all others, however modified by accident or withdrawn by extraordinary circumstances from the spirit of its enactment. It follows that ‘general terms should be so limited in their application as not to lead to injustice, oppression, or an absurd consequence. It will- always, therefore, be presumed that the Legislature intended exceptions to its language which would avoid results of this character. The reason of the law in such cases should prevail over its letter’ ””
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Walker v. Miller · Kritz Estate
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.