James Abbott and Hannah His Wife v. The Essex Company Tenants’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

7 federal appellate · 12 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 29 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““If wills -were always drawn by counsel learned in the law, It would be highly proper that courts should rigidly adhere to precedents, because every Mich instrument might justly be presumed to have been drawn with reference to them. But, in a country where, from necessity or choice, every man acts as his own scrivener, his will is subject to be perverted by the application of rules of construction of which ho was wholly ignorant.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Anderson v. Messinger

2. ““Our inquiry must be, therefore, from an examination of the whole context of this will: (1) Whether, independent of the second clause, by which the estate is limited over, the sons toot an estate in fee simple, or only a life estate; and (2) whether he intended to give over the share of each to the other on the contingency of his death, without issue living at the time of his decease, or upon an indefinite failure of issue.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Anderson v. Messinger

3. ““It is my will that if either of my said sons, namely John or Jacob, should happen-to die without any lawful heirs of his own, then the share of him who may first decease shall accrue to the other survivor and his heirs, ’ ’”

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