Masterson v. Roberts’s Empirical Analysis
1934
Citation profile
19 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 19 later decisions — most recently February 1996
19 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 Ward v. Nolde · Gleissner v. Hughes · Allen Estate Ass'n v. Fred Boeke & Son · Schulenburg v. Hayden · Winslow Bros. v. McCully Stone Mason Co.
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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“`The true construction to put on section 6707, Rev.St.1889 (mortgaged lands section), is that if there is a mortgage on the land, and a contractor, under contract with the owner of the equity of redemption, builds a new house upon the land, he has a mechanic's lien against the house, and the house may be sold, and may be removed from the land by the purchaser; for this preserves to the mortgagee all the security he formerly had, and secures, as far as possible, the payment to the contractor for the work and materials he used in building the house. * * * (It) does not authorize the mechanic's lien to take priority over the mortgage, or the lienholder to sell the reconstructed house and have it removed. It may be that the reconstruction of the house would increase the security of the mortgagee. But he is not bound to rebuild the house. He may be content with his security of the land and the ruins of the house. * * * "Under a different rule it would be in the power of the mortgagor to destroy the security by erecting costly improvements, the expense of which the estate improved could not be able to pay.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Davidson v. Fisher“It is clear that, when the owner of the life estate made the contract in the lease which, because of his conduct, verbal directions, and the condition of the building, by necessary implication, if not by direct statement, clearly obligated the tenants to alter the building from a garage to a moving picture theater, by requiring substantial alterations, he made these lessees his agents within the contemplation of the mechanic’s lien statutes to make such improvements ....”
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.