5 Smith & H. 289 - Carpenter v. Wright’s Empirical Analysis
1929
Citation profile
19 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 21 later decisions — most recently November 2003
19 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 National Refining Co. v. Littlefield
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 21 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Relief is generally refused by courts of equity, because of lapse of time, only in such cases where the loss of evidence, death of witnesses or parties, and failure of memory resulting in the obscuration of facts to the prejudice of the defendant, render uncertain the ascertainment of truth, and make it impossible for the court to pronounce a decree with confidence ... The doctrine of laches ... is not an arbitrary or technical doctrine. No hard and fast rule for its application can be formulated.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Brown v. Ogle“[W]e think that the right of a defendant in equity to resist relief sought against him on the ground of long delay, although short of the statutory period of limitation, is in the nature of defense and is not taken away from him by such statutes. The statutes confer an additional defense.”
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.