DeMarines v. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines’s Empirical Analysis
580 F.2d 1193 · 1978
Citation profile
63 federal appellate · 15 district · 16 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 139 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2019 · most notably Air France v. Saks (1985), Brown v. Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (1994)
63 federal appellate · 15 district · 16 state decisions — followed in 10 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
Applies 28 U.S.C. § 1331
Relies on Erie Co v. Tompkins · Klaxon Co. v. Stentor Electric Manufacturing Co. · Palmer v. Hoffman · Stevens v. Marks · Hill v. Smith
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 139 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“1. the prejudice or surprise in fact of the party against whom the excluded witnesses would have testified; 2. the ability of that party to cure the prejudice; 3. the extent to which waiver of the rule against calling unlisted witnesses would disrupt the orderly and efficient trial of the case or of other cases in the court; 4. bad faith or willfulness in failing to comply with the court’s order.”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“An accident is an event, a physical circumstance, which unexpectedly takes place not according to the usual course of things. If the event on board an airplane is an ordinary, expected, and usual occurrence, then it cannot be termed an accident. To constitute an accident, the occurrence on board the aircraft must be unusual or unexpected, an unusual or unexpected happening.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[B]ecause this case must be retried for reasons to which we have already alluded, we express our view on the district court’s exclusion of evidence of the absence of other claims arising out of the ... flight. All the evidence introduced by plaintiff on the issue of whether an ‘accident’ had occurred bore upon the presence or absence of an injurious effect upon the passengers from the alleged accident. The plaintiff’s own injury was the most probative evidence that an ‘accident’ has occurred. The proffered proof of an absence of other claims tends to prove the absence of other injuries and is, therefore, comparably relevant. The possibility that persons may have sustained injuries without filing claims should not prevent the admission of pertinent evidence, and its negative aspect merely goes to the weakness and weight of such evidence rather than its admissibility. Rule 401 of the Federal Rules of Evidence states that evidence is relevant if it tends to make the existence of a fact more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence. If other claims had been made against KLM, evidence of those claims would have been relevant to make the existence of an accident more probable. Proof of the absence of claims, though not carrying as much weight, makes the existence of the fact of the ‘accident’ less probable than it would be without the evidence. We believe it was error to have excluded it.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.