Fadgen v. Lenkner’s Empirical Analysis
1976
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 59 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 62 later decisions — most recently June 2014 · most notably Lamb v. Wedgewood South Corp. (1983), Kaczkowski v. Bolubasz (1980)
2 federal appellate · 59 state decisions — followed in 12 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.
Relationships
Relies on Roe v. Wade · Liberty Mutual Insurance v. Wetzel · Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur · Kramer v. Union Free School District No. 15 · Munn v. Illinois
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 62 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“... in today’s society it is unreasonable to impose upon a defendant such harsh results without affording any real opportunity to interject logically valid defenses on the merits such as the role of the plaintiffs spouse in the adulterous relationship or the quality of the plaintiffs marriage prior to the occurrence of the acts constituting the tort.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[W]hen it is determined that a past precedent is no longer in accord with modern realities, and the rationale justifying the old rule no longer finds support, then the pledge to certainty gives way `to new conditions and to the persuasion of superior reasoning.'”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“"[W]hat today is a trespass, may, by development of law, not be so tomorrow. Therefore it will not do to say . ., since, once upon a time, at common law, [an event] would have been a tort, giving rise to a claim for damages, that at the present day such an act has all the attributes of a common-law trespass . . .."”
2 later decisions 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.