Cobell v. Norton’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

10 federal appellate · 11 district ·

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 28 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[N]othing in the American Indian Trust Management Reform Act of 1994 ... shall be construed or applied to require the Department of the Interior to commence or continue historical accounting activities with respect to the Individual Indian Money Trust until the earlier of the following shall have occurred: (a) Congress shall have amended the American Indian Trust Management Reform Act of 1994 to delineate the specific historical accounting obligations of the Department of the Interior with respect to the Individual Indian Money Trust; or (b) December 31, 2004.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. City of New York v. Beretta U.S.A. Corp. · 357 F. Supp. 2d 298 - Cobell v. Norton

2. “While a court might certainly act to prevent or remedy a trustee’s wrongful intermingling of trust accounts, this does not imply that the normal remedy would be an order specifying how the trustee should program its computers to avoid intermingling, as opposed to, for example, barring the use of a program that had caused forbidden intermingling or was clearly likely to do so. See Bogert & Bogert, Law of Trusts and Trustees § 861, p. 22 (“If the trustee has been given discretion with respect to the act in question, ... the court will not interfere by ordering him to take a certain line of conduct unless there is proof of an abuse of the discretion .... ”). “[A] court of equity will not interfere to control [trustees] in the exercise of a discretion vested in them by the instrument under which they act.” Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. v. Bruch, 489 U.S. 101 , 111, 109 S.Ct. 948 , 103 L.Ed.2d 80 (1989) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted).”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Cobell v. Kempthorne

3. “[0]f the amounts available under this heading not to exceed $45,000,000 shall be available for records collection and indexing, imaging and coding, accounting for per capita and judgment accounts, accounting for tribal accounts, reviewing and distributing funds from special deposit accounts, and program management of the Office of Historical Trust Accounting, including litigation support.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 532 F. Supp. 2d 37 - Cobell v. Kempthorne