Clarke v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1878
Citation profile
14 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently November 2018
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.
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.
“a well settled rule of construction, that technical words of limitation used in a devise, such as heirs generally, or heirs of the body, shall be allowed their legal effect, unless from subsequent inconsistent words it is made perfectly plain that the testator meant otherwise. Or, to use the language of LORD ELDON, in Wright v. Jesson, 2 Bligh, 1, the words heirs of the body will indeed yield to a particular intent that the estate shall be only for life, and that may be from the effect of superadded words, or any expression showing the particular intent of the testator, but that must be clearly intelligible and unequivocal.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Hall v. Gradwohl
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.