Sheehan v. Gleeson’s Empirical Analysis
1870
Citation profile
14 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently March 1914
14 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 Ruggles v. Collier · City of St. Louis ex rel. Creamer v. Bernoudy
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 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““But defendant’s counsel criticise it as not being sufficiently specific, and insist that too much discretion is still left to the engineer. We should first premise that, as a matter of necessity, some discretion must be left to the executive officers. It would be difficult for ordinances to specify every particular of a work, but they must be more or less general, and must take many things, for granted in the history, geography, and topography of the place, and in the arts called into requisition by the improvements ordered. And we should further premise that an ordinance may lack desirable precision, and still may so' provide for the manner in which an improvement shall be made, and be such a compliance with the law, although a loose one, that .the courts would not be authorized to invalidate the action of the city officers under it. It is not every irregularity or omission that goes, to the substance of a proceeding. “Counsel object that the precise thickness and depth of the curbstones, their material and manner of dressing, are not fixed by the ordinance. I can see no plausibility even in either of the objections except'the first. The ordinance fixed a minimum of thickness and depth, and the contract shows that the curbing was built of precisely those dimensions. It certainly was a direction in relation to the manner of building it, though justly subject to criticism as not being sufficiently specific. Though an irregularity in the action of the common council, yet it wa”
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.