Ferguson v. Johnson’s Empirical Analysis
1933
Citation profile
10 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 11 later decisions — most recently November 1997
10 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 United States v. Missouri Pacific Railroad · Piedmont Northern Ry Co v. Interstate Commerce Commission · Billeter v. State Highway Commission · Springfield Fire & Marine Ins. Co. v. Hassen · Lottman v. Cuilla
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 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The impotence of private individuals to enforce through the courts their contractual rights against the state, by reason of inability to sue the state without its consent, inheres in every such contract.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“The authority of a judicial opinion is limited to the judicial decision. It is what the court decides and not what the court says in so deciding which gives authority to the opinion. It is not a safe practice (but often an unfair one to the author) to isolate general expressions of view, and attempt to give to their apparent meaning in the abstract, a universal application.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. State v. Bryan
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.