Brown v. Campbell’s Empirical Analysis
1914
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 1 district ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently November 1977
4 federal appellate · 1 district ·
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 Mason v. Hepburn · Gordon v. Wentworth · 29 App. D.C. 485 - Richards v. Burkholder
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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The man who secretes his invention makes easier and plainer the path of no one. He contributes nothing to the public. Over and over it has been repeated that the object of the patent system is through protection to stimulate invention, and inventors ought to understand that this is for the public good. Where an invention is made and hidden away it might as well never have been made at all, at least so far as the public is concerned. The law owes nothing to such an inventor, and to permit him to lie in wait, so to speak, for one who independently and in good faith proceeds to make and disclose to the public the same invention would be both unjust and against the policy of the patent laws. In the eyes of the law he is not the prior inventor.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Horwath v. Lee
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.