Olson v. McMullen’s Empirical Analysis
1885
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 22 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 23 later decisions — most recently August 1962
1 federal appellate · 22 state decisions — followed in 10 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 Walsh v. St. Paul & Duluth Railroad
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 23 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““* * * He [plaintiff] appears to be of mature years, and, though perhaps ignorant in some things, of ordinary capacity. He must be presumed to have had the knowledge which common observation forces on the most ordinary intellect, to have known the effect and operation of the law of gravitation and of thawing frost upon a perpendicular bank of earth. He must be presumed to have known that from such causes the earth will break away and fall down, and that the fall must be attended with danger to any one in its way.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Peterson v. Modjeski
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.