Watson v. Williams’s Empirical Analysis
1858
Citation profile
9 federal appellate · 1 district · 37 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 56 later decisions (3 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2025 · most notably Terry (1888), Ex parte Grossman (1925)
9 federal appellate · 1 district · 37 state decisions — followed in 17 states
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 Kearney
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 56 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“'The power to fine and imprison for contempt, from the earliest history of jurisprudence, has been regarded as a necessary incident and attribute of a court, without which it could no more exist than without a judge.'”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. In re Brown · Caldwell v. Caldwell
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.