Hearn v. Rickenbacker’s Empirical Analysis
1987
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 24 later decisions — most recently July 2018
2 federal appellate · 12 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 24 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“a mere contract obligation may establish no relation out of which a separate and specific legal duty arises, and yet extraneous circumstances and conditions in connection with it may establish such a relation as to make its performance a legal duty, and its omission a wrong to be redressed. The duty and the tort grow out of the entire range of facts of which the breach of the contract was but one.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“The fact that a lawsuit seeks to recover a loss that was covered by an insurance policy, alone, should not dictate the nature of a plaintiff's claims . . . Although the contract of insurance may be one source of the insurer's obligation to pay the loss, the insurer may also be held liable for tortious conduct that is wholly separable from its purely contractual duties. [ Hearn, 428 Mich. at 40-41 , 400 N.W.2d 90 .]”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“[a]lthough mere allegations of failure to discharge obligations under [an] insurance contract would not be actionable in tort, where, as here, the breach of separate and independent duties are alleged, [the insureds] should be allowed an opportunity to prove [their] causes of action.”
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.