Yentzer v. Hemenway’s Empirical Analysis
1968
Citation profile
6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 9 later decisions — most recently July 2001
6 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 Lindblom v. Round Valley Water Co. · Horse Creek Conservation District v. Lincoln Land Co. · Scherck v. Nichols · Smith v. Hawkins · In Re Birdwood Irr. Dist., Water Division No. 1-A
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 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Appellants raise the point of water availability as being important in an abandonment and unquestionably it is. However, counsel misconstrues the holding of our cases when he insists on the strength of Ramsay v. Gottsche, 51 Wyo. 516 , 69 P.2d 535 , that abandonment must be established by evidence showing that during the five years the failure to use the water was voluntary and that at all times there was water available for the appropriators to divert and use beneficially. The statutes, § 41 — 47 ff., by their wording do not make availability of water an element of proof in order to effect an abandonment, and none of our eases on the subject so hold, nor could they have done so with propriety. What they do say is well summarized in Scherck v. Nichols, 55 Wyo. 4 , 95 P.2d 74, 80 , ‘An abandonment of a water right * * * must be voluntary. It cannot be held to be abandoned, if non-user is caused by facts not under the appropriator’s control.’ “Nonavailability, as well as other factors not under the appropriator’s control, is properly a matter of defense, and contestants in a water abandonment case are not obligated to show availability over the period of nonuse. In that connection, it is to be noted that the appellees here pleaded that appellants had water in excess of that which they could use or had beneficially used, notwithstanding the lack of necessity therefor. However, a party by pleading more facts than he needs to does not ordinarily obligate himself to prove them. Hi”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.