Ryan v. Kent’s Empirical Analysis
1931
Citation profile
8 federal appellate · 43 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 53 later decisions — most recently December 2010 · most notably First National Bank in Dallas v. Kinabrew (1979), Clopton Rogers v. Osborn (1953)
8 federal appellate · 43 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 Waggoner Estate v. Sigler Oil Co. · Freeport Sulphur Co. v. American Sulphur Royalty Co. · Reed v. Insurance Co. · Decker v. Kirlicks · Texas Pacific Coal & Oil Co. v. Barker
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 53 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A clear statement of this rule is that made in Reed v. Insurance Co., 95 U.S. 23, 30 , 24 L.Ed. 348 , wherein the court said: “Although a written agreement cannot be varied (by addition or subtraction) by proof of circumstances out of which it grew and which surrounded its adoption, yet such circumstances are constantly resorted to for the purpose of ascertaining the subject-matter and the stand-point of the parties in relation thereto. Without some knowledge derived from such evidence, it would be impossible to comprehend the meaning of an instrument, or the effect to be given to the words of which it is composed. This preliminary knowledge is as indispensable as that of the language in which the instrument is written. A reference to the actual condition of things at the time, as they appeared to the parties themselves, is often necessary to prevent the court, in construing their language, from falling into mistakes and even absurdities. * * * ‘It may, and indeed it often does, happen, that, in consequence of the surrounding circumstances being proved in evidence, the courts give to the instrument, thus relatively considered an interpretation very different from what it would have received, had it been considered in the abstract. But this is only just and proper; since the effect of the evidence is not to vary the language employed, but merely to explain the sense in which the writer understood it.’ ””
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.