Bell v. Bell’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
25 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 25 later decisions — most recently August 2018 · most notably Krapf v. Krapf (2003), 20 Mass. App. Ct. 811 - Grubert v. Grubert (1985)
25 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 M. H. Gordon & Son, Inc. v. Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission · Trimmer · Bell v. Bell
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 25 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Clearly, the parties [to the agreement] thought that a man and a woman could live together in a way that would normally be associated with being married without their actually being married and without claiming or acknowledging a marriage relationship. It is difficult to conceive of what conduct the parties [to the agreement] contemplated if that conduct did not at least include the [wife’s] sharing a bedroom with a man on a regular basis for approximately three years.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“so as to give the outward appearance of marriage,”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Smith v. Smith
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.