Lennon v. MacGregor’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 2 district · 19 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 25 later decisions — most recently June 2014 · most notably McInnis v. A.M.F., Inc. (1985), Rotelli v. Catanzaro (1996)
4 federal appellate · 2 district · 19 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 Hasselrode v. Gnagey · Westinghouse Broadcasting Co. v. Dial Media, Inc. · Slefkin v. Tarkomian · Marandola v. Hillcrest Builders, Inc. · O'CONNOR v. McKanna
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.
“[The unnamed tortfeasor] seeks to take advantage of some stray words in the release which have no more relation to the defendant than the hieroglyphics on some prehistoric sarcophagus buried in the subterranean depths of Egypt. every other vehicle owner involved in a serious accident. In spite of all this the [joint tortfeasor], — by its superficial appraisement of certain words in the agreement, by a failure to look beneath the moth-eaten phrases of that stereotyped form so as to ascertain the true intention of the parties, by a determination to take the advantage of the syllable and not the spirit, by letter and not by law, — is now on the way to coming into a windfall____”
2 later decisions 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.