Church v. Jones’s Empirical Analysis
1943
Citation profile
14 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions — most recently March 1966
14 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 Snyder's Estate · 103 N.J. Eq. 435 - In Re Low · Nielsen v. Jepson · Palmer v. Estate of Palmer · Ives v. Canby
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 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The intention to be determined is whether the testator intended to give a specific thing, and that alone, or whether he intended to give a bequest that, in any event, should be paid out of his general estate. In determining this intent, the courts have held that there is a strong presumption that the bequest was intended to be general and not specific, and, in cases of doubt, the courts will presume that the testator intended to give a general bequest rather than a specific one.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[A] gift of a certain number of securities described by the name of the corporation, or by value or quantity, but not indicating any particular lot of such securities, will be construed as a general bequest if there is nothing on the face of the will or in evidence of the surrounding circumstances, where admissible, to indicate that the testator intended a gift only of the securities owned by him.”
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.