McDaniel v. Pickens’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

5 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 5 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Suppose a defendant’s expert in a particular malpractice action has appeared for numerous defendant physicians all insured by one or a group of liability insurers and expects further references from the same sources; a judge may admit such evidence as tending to prove the expert’s biased mindset . . . But where an expert has had no relation to any liability insurer apart from the fact that the defendant’s insurer in the end footed his bill, a judge might decide to limit the cross-examination to exclude reference to the insurance altogether, and so avoid any collateral entanglements . . . The trial judge in the present case acted incautiously when, as per se proposition, without apprehending what the situation might turn out tobe, he excluded all reference to liability insurance that might be offered in proof of an expert’s bias . ...”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 13 Mass. L. Rptr. 17 - Thomas v. Sarfaty