Watson v. Garvin’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

1 district · 16 state decisions

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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “A deposed minister or an excommunicated member of a church, cannot appeal to the civil courts for redress. They can look alone to their own judicatories for relief, and must abide the judgment of their highest courts as final and conclusive. But when property rights are concerned, the ecclesiastical courts have no power whatever to pass on them so as to bind the civil courts. * * *”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Murr v. Maxwell

2. ““The true ground why civil courts do not interfere with the decrees of ecclesiastical courts, where no property rights are involved, is not because such decrees are final and conclusive, but because they have no jurisdiction whatever in such matters, and cannot take cognizance of them at all, whether they have been adjudicated or not by those tribunals.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Protestant Reformed Church of Edgerton v. Tempelman