Soares v. Roberts’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

5 federal appellate · 3 district · 11 state decisions

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

1. ““ ‘When one seeks out services which are personal in nature, such as those rendered by attorneys [or] physicians * * * and travels to the locality where he knows the services will actually be rendered, he must realize that the services are not directed to impact on any particular place, but are directed to the needy person himself. While it is true that the nature of such services is that if they are negligently done, their consequences will thereafter be felt wherever the client or patient may go, it would be fundamentally unfair to permit a suit in whatever distant jurisdiction the patient may carry the consequences of his treatment * * *. “ ‘The residence of a recipient of personal services rendered elsewhere is irrelevant and totally incidental to the benefits provided by the defendant at his own location. It is clear that when a client or patient travels to receive professional services without having been solicited * * * then the client who originally traveled to seek services apparently not available at home ought to expect he will have to travel again if he thereafter complains that the services sought by him in the foreign jurisdiction were therein rendered improperly.’ ” Id. at 306 .”

   3 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. Coggeshall v. Reproductive Endocrine Associates · Tarango v. Pastrana

2. “In the case of personal services focus must be on the place where the services are rendered, since this is the place of the receiver’s (here the patient’s) need. The need is personal and the services rendered are in response to the dimensions of that personal need. They are directed to no place but to the needy person herself. It is in the very nature of such services that their consequences will be felt wherever the person may choose to go. However, the idea that tortious rendition of such services is a portable tort which can be deemed to have been committed wherever the consequences foreseeably were felt is wholly inconsistent with the public interest in having services of this sort generally available. Medical services in particular should not be proscribed by doctor’s concerns as to where the patient may carry the consequences of his treatment and in what distant lands he may be called upon to defend it. The traveling public would be ill served were the treatment of local doctors confined to so much aspirin as would get the patient into the next state. The scope of medical treatment should be defined by the patient’s needs, as diagnosed by the doctor, rather than by geography.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 462 F. Supp. 308 - Glover v. Wagner