Holmes v. Elder’s Empirical Analysis
1936
Citation profile
21 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 23 later decisions — most recently January 2019
21 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.
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 23 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The purpose of interpreting an instrument is to see what is the intention expressed by the words used. If from the imperfection of language it is impossible to know what the intention is without inquiring further, then see what the circumstances were with reference to which the words were used, and what was the object, appearing from those circumstances, which the persons using them had in view.” Holmes v. Elder et al., 170 Tenn. 257, 261, 262 , 94 S.W.2d 390, 392 , 104 A.L.R. 1282 .”
3 later decisions 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.