Smith v. Shepard’s Empirical Analysis
1939
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 22 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 35 later decisions — most recently February 2021 · most notably Spiegel's Estate v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue (1949), Cahill v. Michael (1942)
6 federal appellate · 22 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 Knight v. Pottgieser · Lachenmyer v. Gehlbach · Carter v. Carter · Weberpals v. Jenny · Warrington v. Chester
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 35 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““(3) There is another class of cases where the devise is not immediate but is of a future interest to take effect in possession upon a termination of an intervening particular estate. In such case, unless the will shows the testator intended to refer to a different date than the termination of the particular estate, the rule is that the gift over will take effect if the contingency happens at any time before the termination of the particular estate, and death without issue means death without issue before the termination of the particular estate.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Pyne v. Pyne
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.