Fries v. Ritter’s Empirical Analysis
1955
Citation profile
27 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 31 later decisions — most recently December 1985 · most notably Hamil v. Bashline (1978), Smith v. Bell Telephone Co. (1959)
27 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 Murray v. Philadelphia Transportation Co. · Ebersole v. Beistline · Lewis v. Quinn · Finnin v. Neubert · Silberstein v. Showell, Fryer & Co.
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 31 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“* * * where circumstantial evidence is relied upon to prove negligence the evidence must be such as to enable the jury to concludenot by conjecture or guess butas a reasonable and legitimate inference that the accident was caused by the negligence of the defendant. In order to do so the evidence must clearly and sufficiently describe or picture the happening of the accident in such a manner that the only reasonable inference and conclusion from the facts and circumstances which were proved is that defendant was negligent.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passagee.g. Chapman v. Redwine · Gift v. Palmer
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.