Benson v. Morrow’s Empirical Analysis
1875
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 45 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 52 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently November 1980 · most notably McKee v. Gratz (1922), Cooley v. Golden (1893)
1 federal appellate · 45 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 52 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Suppose the channel of the river between an island and the mainland is left dry by the water, and entirely filled up with deposits of mud, and the island and mainland are at last one continuous tract of land; could the owner of either claim the entire tract? Certainly the newly formed land would belong to the United States, or it would be divided between the opposite owners, upon the common-law principle applicable to nonnavigable streams, of each going to the thread of the channel as it was before it was-deserted by the water. In the event supposed, the river might be regarded, as ceasing to be a navigable one pro hae vice, or, rather, as being converted, at the slough between the island and the shore, into a nonnavigable one. In any event, the owner of the shore could not claim both the alluvion and the island, nor, vice versa, could the owner of the island claim the tract on the-bank, with its accessions by alluvion.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority““When land is torn from the banks of this stream (Missouri) and plunged into its turbid waters, its component parts are never after distinguishable — the sand .and clay and soil, and trees, and roots and logs are soon utterly undistinguishable from any other similar substances, and their destination can never be traced, ■except that they ultimately go into the gulf of Mexico, unless previously to reaching the ocean they are deposited on either bank or on some island.” (p. 352.)”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Wood v. McAlpine
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.