Becker v. Schwartz’s Empirical Analysis
1978
Citation profile
15 federal appellate · 3 district · 189 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 285 later decisions — most recently April 2021 · most notably Payton v. Abbott Labs (1982), 31 Cal. 3d 220 - Turpin v. Sortini (1982)
15 federal appellate · 3 district · 189 state decisions — followed in 33 states
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.
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 285 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A doctor who provides prenatal care to an expectant mother should not be held liable if the child is born with a genetic defect. Any attempt to find the physician responsible, even to a limited extent, for an injury which the child unquestionably inherited from his parents requires a distortion or abandonment of fundamental legal principles and recognition, by the courts, of controversial rights and duties more appropriate for consideration and debate by a legislative body. These problems, which are always present when the child born with a genetic disorder seeks to hold the doctor responsible, are compounded'when the parents seek compensation, on their own behalf, for collateral injuries occasioned by emotional distress or the increased cost of caring for a handicapped child. The heart of the problem in these cases is that the physician cannot be said to have caused the defect. The disorder is genetic and not the result of any injury negligently inflicted by the doctor. In addition, it is incurable and was incurable from the moment of conception. Thus the doctor’s alleged negligent failure to detect it during prenatal examination cannot be considered a cause of the condition by analogy to those cases in which the doctor has failed to make a timely diagnosis of a curable disease. The child’s handicap is an inexorable result of conception and birth. In sum, by holding the doctor responsible for the birth of a genetically handicapped child, and thus obligated to pay most, if no”
8 later decisions 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.