Weeks v. Billings’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

2 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 4 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““Although the trustee may in some sense be regarded as a defendant, and the question of his liability be tried by a jury or by the court, he has, nevertheless, never been regarded by the courts as a defendant, in the proper and usual sense of the term, and, in common parlance, is known and called by the name of trustee, while his alleged creditor is called the principal defendant. They are not sued in the same right, and are not answerable to the plaintiff in the same manner. The principal is sued on account of some alleged injury which the plaintiff has sustained by his act or neglect. But, as between the plaintiff and trustee, there is no privity of contract, or other act pr neglect by which the plaintiff has sustained damage. The property and credits of the principal defendant in his hands are attached, and he is summoned to show cause why execution should not issue against him for the damage which the plaintiff may recover against the principal defendant. The process as to him is rather to be regarded as an attachment of the defendant’s property in his hands; and even if this were an action in which the state and federal courts had original concurrent jurisdiction of the funds of the defendant in the hands of the trustee, the state court, being the one before whom proceedings were first had, and whose jurisdiction first attached, would retain its jurisdiction to the exclusion of the other court, if the only controversy were as to the disposition of the funds so attached.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Pratt v. Albright