44 Cal. 2d 121 - Sparks v. Redinger’s Empirical Analysis
1955
Citation profile
26 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 26 later decisions — most recently July 1981 · most notably Brandelius v. City & County of San Francisco (1957), Treber v. Superior Court (1968)
26 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 Mazzotta v. Los Angeles Railway Corp. · Daniels v. City & County of San Francisco · Girdner v. Union Oil Co. · 28 Cal. 2d 357 - Ballard v. Pacific Greyhound Lines · 40 Cal. 2d 630 - Sills v. Los Angeles Transit Lines
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 26 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[14] What then is the main factor which may make plaintiff's negligence, in the eyes of the law, a remote cause rather than a proximate cause of the accident? It is obviously the existence of some such appreciable interval after the time that plaintiff has reached a state of helplessness as to enable defendant to gain actual knowledge of plaintiff's state of helplessness, and to have a last clear chance to avoid the accident. And as above indicated, such state of helplessness is reached only when plaintiff's negligence has placed him”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“The only purpose of the last clear chance doctrine is to relieve the injured party from the rigid application of the rule that contributory negligence will bar his recovery, when the circumstances are such that it may be said that such party's negligence is a remote, rather than a proximate, cause of his injuries. (Girdner v. Union Oil Co., 216 Cal. 197, 201-204 [ 13 P.2d 915 ]; Center v. Yellow Cab Co., 216 Cal. 205, 207-208 [ 13 P.2d 918 ].) In other words, the last clear chance doctrine is but a 'phase of the doctrine of proximate cause' in its relation to the negligence of the injured party who seeks to invoke it.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Holman v. Viko
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.