Patton v. La Bree’s Empirical Analysis
1963
Citation profile
48 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 48 later decisions — most recently November 1981 · most notably 8 Cal. 3d 855 - Brown v. Merlo (1973), 21 Cal. 3d 841 - Cooper v. Bray (1978)
48 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 Silver v. Silver · 60 Cal. 2d 276 - Professional Fire Fighters, Inc. v. City of Los Angeles · 45 Cal. 2d 421 - Emery v. Emery · 9 Cal. 2d 279 - McCann v. Hoffman · People v. Western Fruit Growers
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 48 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It cannot be said that the classification made by the Legislature in the 1961 amendment to section 17158 [adding the owner provision] is arbitrary or that no set of facts reasonably can be conceived that would sustain it. The relationship between a driver and the owner of the car who is a passenger is obviously different from that existing between a driver and a passenger who is not an owner. In making the distinction between owner-passengers and nonowner-passengers, the Legislature may have taken into consideration the fact that an owner generally has the right to direct and control the driver, but a nonowner ordinarily does not have that right.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.