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← 46 MASSAPPCT 712 - Steele v. Kelley

Steele v. Kelley’s Empirical Analysis

1999

Citation profile

24
cited by 24 later decisions
1
states following
November 2021
most recently cited

1 district · 23 state decisions

How this case has been cited

Cited by 24 later decisions — most recently November 2021

1 district · 23 state decisions

1301999200020102020decided

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 Morrison v. Olson · Dwyer v. Globe Newspaper Co. · My Bread Baking Co. v. Cumberland Farms, Inc. · Linkage Corp. v. Trustees of Boston University · John Hetherington & Sons, Ltd. v. William Firth Co.

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.

  1. “[W]hen interpreting trust language, ... we do not read words in isolation and out of context. Rather we strive to discern the settlor's intent from the trust instrument as a whole and from the circumstances known to the settlor at the time the instrument was executed.”
    1 later decision quote this exact passage
  2. “[t]he trustee shall not be liable . . . for any act or omission in the exercise of this trust, so long as he acts in good faith . . . [and he] shall not be liable for anything except his own personal and willful misfeasance or fraud.”
    1 later decision quote this exact passage
  3. “[T]he interpretation of a written trust is a matter of law to be resolved by the court.”
    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.