Marchetti v. Kalish’s Empirical Analysis
1990
Citation profile
232 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 242 later decisions — most recently August 2025 · most notably Thompson v. McNeill (1990), Anderson v. City of Massillon (2012)
232 state decisions — followed in 18 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 Delli Paoli v. United States · Turcotte v. Fell · 31 Ill. App. 3d 212 - Nabozny v. Barnhill · Hackbart v. Cincinnati Bengals, Inc. · Kabella v. Bouschelle
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 242 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[w]here individuals engage in recreational or sports activities, they assume the ordinary risks of the activity and cannot recover for any injury unless it can be shown that the other participant's actions were either `reckless' or `intentional' as defined in Sections 500 and 8A of the Restatement of Torts 2d.”
21 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“The actor’s conduct is in reckless disregard of the safety of another if he does an act or intentionally fails to do an act which it is his duty to the other to do, knowing or having reason to know of facts which would lead a reasonable man to realize, not only that his conduct creates an unreasonable risk of physical harm to another, but also that such risk is substantially greater than that which is necessary to make his conduct negligent.”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“'requires a conscious choice of a course of action, either with knowledge of the serious danger to others involved in it or with knowledge of facts which would disclose this danger to any reasonable man.'”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.