McDonald v. Patterson’s Empirical Analysis
1880
Citation profile
15 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently October 1946
15 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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““No public work or improvement of any description whatsoever shall be done or made in any city, in, upon, or about the streets thereof, or otherwise, the cost and expense of which is made chargeable or may be assessed upon private property by special assessment, unless an estimate of such cost and expense shall be made, and an assessment in proportion to benefits, on the property to be affected or benefited, shall be levied, collected, and paid into the city treasury before such work or improvement shall be commenced, or any contract for letting or doing the same authorized or performed.” (Art. 11, sec. 19.)”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Thomason v. Ruggles
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.