Hale v. Danforth’s Empirical Analysis
1876
Citation profile
4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently April 1913
4 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 4 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Mrs. Hale was clothed by her husband with no authority to act for and bind him in any matter whatever. She was merely constituted the bearer of an interrogatory, a service which includes none of the essential elements, but only the mere shadow of an agency. To hold that she was the agent of her husband, and therefore a competent witness for him, would open the door to gross abuse. If anything is well settled in the law, it is settled to be against a sound public policy to permit husband and wife to testify against each other.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Fish v. Bloodworth
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.