Bunner v. Patti’s Empirical Analysis
1938
Citation profile
20 federal appellate · 58 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 86 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 2013 · most notably Carroll v. Lanza (1955), McDonnell Aircraft Corp. v. Hartman-Hanks-Walsh Painting Co. (1959)
20 federal appellate · 58 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 Maltz v. Jackoway-Katz Cap Co. · O'Brien v. Chicago City Railway Co. · Pruitt v. Harker · State v. Benjamin F. Bennett Building Co. · 86 Ind. App. 534 - Artificial Ice & Cold Storage Co. v. Waltz
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 86 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[T]he immediate contractor or subcontractor shall be liable as an employer of the employees of his subcontractors.... The liability of the immediate employer shall be primary, and that of the others secondary in their order[.] ... No such employer shall be liable as in this section provided, if the employee was insured by his immediate or any intermediate employer.”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage“[S]o far as the injured employee is concerned, the liability of the remote employers is not secondary. He can recover against them directly and primarily; it is their business to recoup off the immediate employer and if they do not they lose. In other words, the principal part of [§ 287.040.3] does not attempt to fix the liability so far as the person injured is concerned but deals with the liability inter sese of the persons who are liable to the persons injured. But the last sentence of subsection (d) — stressed by [the employee] — then adds that no remote employer shall be liable as in the section provided if the injured employee was insured by his immediate or any intermediate employer. However, it does not say he shall no longer be deemed an employer, and that he shall be considered as outside the protection of the Act. The subsection deals with employers under various degrees of liability ranging from primary liability to non-liability and treats them all as being within the Act. There is no disclosure of any legislative intent to outcast a remote employer because he avails himself of a condition contained in the subsection, by requiring his subcontractors to carry liability insurance. Neither is there any discernible intent to prefer one class of employees over another, by permitting the employees of a subcontractor to recover from him compensation for injuries and at the same time sue the remote employer for negligently inflicting them; whereas the direct employees of”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““We are, therefore, squarely confronted with the single question whether the employee of a subcontractor if negligently injured by the general contractor can sue the latter for damages at common law as a third person and at the same time collect compensation from his immediate employer under the Compensation Act — when the immediate employer carries liability insurance covering the casualty and all the other facts bring the case within the Compensation Act.””
2 later decisions 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.