Nelson v. Freeland’s Empirical Analysis
1998
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 175 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 198 later decisions — most recently March 2025 · most notably Stein v. Asheville City Board of Education (2006), 140 N.C. App. 737 - Von Viczay v. Thoms (2000)
2 federal appellate · 175 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 Ohio Bureau of Employment Services v. Hodory · Rowland v. Christian · Kermarec v. Compagnie Generale Transatlantique · Rogers v. Loether · Mounsey v. Ellard
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 198 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“duty to exercise reasonable care in the maintenance of their premises for the protection of lawful visitors.”
13 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“In an effort to do justice in an industrialized urban society, with its complex economic and individual relationships, modern common-law courts have found it necessary to formulate increasingly subtle verbal refinements, to create sub-classifications among traditional common-law categories, and to delineate fine gradations in the standards of care which the landowner owes to each. Yet even within a single jurisdiction, the classifications and subclassifications bred by the common law have produced confusion and conflict. As new distinctions have been spawned, older ones have become obscured. Through this semantic morass the common law has moved, unevenly and with hesitation, towards “imposing on owners and occupiers a single duty of reasonable care in all the circumstances.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“created to disgorge the jury of some of its power by either allowing the judge to take the case from the jury based on legal rulings or by forcing the jury to apply the mechanical rules of the tricho-tomy instead of considering the pertinent issue of whether the landowner acted reasonably in maintaining his land.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.