Fifield v. Edwards’s Empirical Analysis
1878
Citation profile
12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently April 1945
12 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.
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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““It cannot be suffered that a controversy shall be tried over and over, but the one suit tried, submitted, and disposed of on the merits must conclude the litigation. If a party has been so negligent or so unfortunate as to fail in making a full presentation of his case, whereby the judgment was passed against him, he cannot be helped on making a better showing in a new suit. The estoppel does not depend upon the question whether justice was done in the first suit, but upon the merits having once been considered and passed upon.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Hoppin v. Avery
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.