Capen v. Peckham’s Empirical Analysis
1868
Citation profile
31 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 32 later decisions — most recently August 2022 · most notably Waterbury Petroleum Products, Inc. v. Canaan Oil & Fuel Co. (1984), Toffolon v. Town of Avon (1977)
31 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.
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 32 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Property is divided into two great divisions, things personal and things real, and fixtures may be found along the dividing line. They are composed of articles that were once chattels, or such in their nature, and by physical annexation to real property have become accessory to it and parcel of it.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“. . . the law is said to be indulgent to a tenant in cases that arise between him and his landlord, and declares that to be a chattel which between grantor and grantee would be held to be real estate. This arises from the fact that when a tenant erects expensive structures for the carrying on of his trade or business, which can be removed without destruction to them or material injury to the freehold, the relation of the tenant to the property in question renders it unreasonable to suppose that he intended to make them a part of the realty belonging to another, thus making a donation of them to the owner of the soil.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“that an article should not only be annexed to the freehold, but that it should clearly appear from an inspection of the property itself, taking into consideration the character of the annexation, the nature and the adaptation of the article annexed to the uses and purposes to which that part of the building was appropriated at the time the annexation was made, and the relation of the party making it to the property in question, that a permanent accession to the freehold was intended to be made by the annexation of the article.”
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.