Ex parte Bennett’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 federal appellate · 14 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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““The principal objection made for the petitioner, as we understand it, is/that the cause was tried at chambers, and not in open Court; and it is said that there is no authority to try a cause except in open Court. “But even if this be so, we do not see that it would follow that a judgment rendered in a cause which had been tried at chambers would for that reason necessarily be void in the absolute sense. “The District Court in Sonoma unquestionably had jurisdiction of the subject matter and of the parties litigant. Had the Court itself rendered the judgment in question in open session at a regular term, without trial, without proof, and even without submission of the cause for decision, such judgment, however erroneous, would not be held void upon a mere collateral attack. To maintain that it would, would be to ignore the obvious distinction between a total want of authority upon the one hand, and the erroneous exercise of conceded authority upon the other. . . . “The hearing of proofs, the argument of counsel—in other words, the trial had, or the absence of any or all of these—• neither confer jurisdiction in the first instance, nor take it away after it has once fully attached.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Hamblin v. Superior Court