O'Brien v. Walker’s Empirical Analysis
1939
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 16 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 17 later decisions — most recently January 2025
1 federal appellate · 16 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 Sewall v. Roberts · Mooney v. Tolles · McDonald v. Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis R'y Co. · Koenig v. State · Chater v. Carter
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 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“If the usages in regard to the force and meaning of adoption prior to 1841, had been uniform, so as to establish a custom having the force of law, in all cases of adoption, this case would present a different aspect; for proof of the unwritten law of the land is never required. But no one would claim that every relation of keiki hanai carried the inheritance.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent“[t]he term 'issue,' shorn of any and all judicial constructions and taken in its ordinary and popular sense[,] . . . is definitely a general term synonymous with children, progeny, offspring, descendants, etc.”
1 later decision 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.