36 Tenn. App. 469 - Sullivan v. Crabtree’s Empirical Analysis
1953
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 49 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 57 later decisions — most recently November 2008 · most notably Quinby v. Plumsteadville Family Practice, Inc. (2006), Seavers v. Methodist Medical Center of Oak Ridge (1999)
4 federal appellate · 49 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 George Foltis, Inc. v. City of New York · Galbraith v. Busch · Kay v. Metropolitan Street Railway Co. · Tabler v. Perry · 24 Tenn. App. 96 - Tallent v. Fox
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 57 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"[W]here the thing [causing the harm] is shown to be under the management of defendant or his servants, and the accident is such as in the ordinary course of things does not happen if those who have the management use proper care, it affords reasonable evidence, in the absence of explanation by the defendants, that the accident arose from want of care."”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage““In our opinion, res ipa (sic) loquitur means that the facts of the occurrence warrant the inference of negligence, not that they compel such an inference; that they furnish circumstantial evidence of negligence where direct evidence of it may be lacking, but it is evidence to be weighed, not necessarily to be accepted as sufficient, that they call for explanation or rebuttal, not necessarily that they require it; that they make a case to be decided by the jury, not that they forestall the verdict. Res ipsa loquitur, where it applies, does not convert the defendant’s general issue into an affirmative defense. When all the evidence is in, the question for the jury is whether the preponderance is with the plaintiff.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage““While we agree that these facts made a case of res ipsa loquitur, we do not agree that they, though unexplained, required an inference or finding of negligence, or that the jury could not reasonably refuse to find negligence and return a verdict for defendant, or that there was no evidence to support their verdict for him.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Whitley v. Hix · Shivers v. Ramsey
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.