Burnham v. Mitchell’s Empirical Analysis
1874
Citation profile
21 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 21 later decisions — most recently August 2005
21 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.
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 21 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“when the capacity to do a certain act is in issue, the question is whether or not the alleged insane person had sufficient mental ability to know what he was doing, and the nature of the act done.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“every idiot, non compos, lunatic and distracted person,”
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.