Morrison v. Holt’s Empirical Analysis
1861
Citation profile
16 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently January 2012
16 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 Shelton v. Pendleton · Parsons v. Parsons · Morris v. Palmer · Wing v. Hurlburt
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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““ In order to charge the defendant in the present case, it is not sufficient for the plaintiffs merely to show that the defendant’s misconduct gave occasion for the proceedings instituted by the wife, but it must also appear that those proceedings were necessary for the personal protection and safety of the wife. There is no evidence tending to show this: the proceedings were not had for her present or even future support as the defendant’s wife, but they were intended to dissolve the marriage contract and release her from the position of wife to the defendant, because of his past misconduct; they looked not to protection from any present or future act of her husband, but merely to the enforcement of a right to a change of future condition, that she claimed had arisen from his previous fault. It has not been the policy of our law to imply from the marital relation any authority in the wife to bind the husband for the expense of such proceedings; her implied authority, where it exists, seems to arise from the relation, if not as an incident essential to its preservation, certainly as a consequence of its continued, existence, and not as a power reserved for its destruction. It is said that ‘ it is never necessary for the safety of the wife, as such, to obtain a divorce from her husband or to resist his obtaining one from her.’ Bishop’s Mar. & Div., sec. 571.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.