Hedges v. Dixon County’s Empirical Analysis
37 F. 304 · 1889
Citation profile
2 federal appellate ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 4 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 1954
2 federal appellate ·
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 County of Dixon v. Field · County of Daviess v. Dickinson · Canal Bank v. Hudson
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 4 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Conceding that the'bonds, as they stand, are void, and that no recovery can be had thereon in a court of law, complainants insist that a court of equity has power to scale them down to an amount equal to that that the county might lawfully have issued, and enforce them when thus scaled down. It is said that the vice of this transaction is only in the matter of excess; that a court of equity may expunge the vice, and enforce the contract thus freed from taint. Counsel for complainants concedes that he has been unable to find any precedent for such a proceeding, and his confession of inability is satisfactory evidence that no such precedent exists, so that the question must be determined by reference to the general principles of law; and here it may be remarked that the'difference between courts of law and those of equity is mainly one of forms and remedies, rather than in the matter of absolute' rights and obligations. If a contract be pronounced absolutely void in a court of law, it must expect the same denunciation in a court of equity. Courts of equity, like those of law, must accept contracts as they are made, and have no power to make contracts for parties. If the contracts which parties attempt to make are void because in defiance of some statute or common law, they are void alike in either court, and neither court can change a void into a valid contract. Now, the contráct in this case, in its inception, was on the part of the county a single and indivisible obligation;”
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.