Covington Estate’s Empirical Analysis
1943
Citation profile
22 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 24 later decisions — most recently August 2017
22 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 Commonwealth v. Harman · Maginn's Estate · In Re the Probate of the Will of Field · Estate of Merryfield v. Fox · Wikoff's Appeal
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 24 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In determining whether or not papers prima facie testamentary in character should be admitted to probate, we should not proceed on the assumption that a crime has been committed. Chief Justice Gibson said in Wikoff's Appeal, supra: [fn. *] 'The presumption of innocence is favored by the law, ... it would be criminal in a stranger to filch and suppress a part of a will ....' Nor should courts decline to accept such papers as testamentary because their physical relationship is such that fraudulent substitution might have been possible. In will cases fraud is almost always possible. Each case must be decided on its own facts.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“In these days when most wills are typewritten the fact that a sentence or a paragraph is partly on one page and partly on another would not obviate all possibility of fraud. For example, the last word on page one of such a ‘looseleaf will might read: ‘I bequeath to my brother John Smith’, and the words on the top of page two might read ‘five thousand dollars’. No one could be certain that page two of the will as originally written had not been taken out and a new page two inserted, substituting the words five thousand for five hundred.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage““To adopt judicially the ‘possibility of fraud’ test in ‘will cases’ means in practical effect that if the contestant of any will can show that the challenged will was so made that fraud might have been perpetrated in its making its invalidation becomes a very simple procedural matter.””
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.