Shields v. Thomas’s Empirical Analysis
59 U.S. 253 · 1855
Citation profile
41 federal appellate · 19 district · 21 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 134 later decisions (19 by the Supreme Court) — most recently May 2015 · most notably National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. (1937), Barney v. Latham (1880)
41 federal appellate · 19 district · 21 state decisions — followed in 11 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
Relies on James D'Arcy v. Morris Ketchum Thomas Rogers and Edward Bement Copartners Trading Under the Name and Firm of Ketchum Rogers and Bement · Rangely v. Webster · Richard v. Walton
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 134 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““With respect to the character and effects of decrees in chancery, although they now rank in dignity upon an equality with judgments at law, it is well known that they were once regarded as not being matters of record, and that the final process incident to judgments at law was unknown to and not permitted in courts of equity; that where such process has been permitted to them, it has been the result of statutory enactments. But the extension to a court of equity of the power to avail itself of common-law process cannot be regarded as implying any abridgment of the original constitutional powers or practice of the former, but as cumulative and ancillary, or as leaving those powers and that practice as they formerly existed, except as they should have been expressly restricted. Amongst the original and undoubted powers of a court of equity is that of entertaining a hill filed for enforcing and carrying into effect a decree of the same or of a different court, as the exigencies of the case or the interests of the parties may require. Vide Story’s Equity Pleading, §§ 429, 430, 431, upon the authority of Mitford, Eq. Pl. 95, and of Cooper's Eq. Pl. 98, 99.” Shainwald v. Lewis (D. C.) 69 Fed. 487 .”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“limited to rights and remedies peculiarly legal in their nature,”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“There is, perhaps,.no rule established for the conducting of equity pleadings, with reference to which (whilst as a rule it is universally admitted) there has existed less of certainty and uniformity in application, than has attended this ^elating to multifariousness. This effect, flowing, perhaps inevitably, from the variety of modes and degrees of right and 'interest entering into the transactions of life, seems to have led to a conclusion rendering therule almost as much an exception as a rule, and that conclusion is, that each case must bé determined by its peculiar features.”
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.