Matheson v. Pearson’s Empirical Analysis
1980
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 4 district · 7 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 18 later decisions — most recently August 2005
4 federal appellate · 4 district · 7 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 18 Cal. 2d 863 - Donnelly v. Southern Pacific Co. · Danculovich v. Brown · Hackbart v. Cincinnati Bengals, Inc. · Rocky Mountain Produce Trucking Co. v. Johnson · Stricklin v. Parsons Stockyard Co.
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 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“An individual may undertake an intentional act, such as throwing the tootsie pop in this particular case, and if the act is undertaken without an intent to harm or a substantial certainty that harm will result from the act, the actor is not guilty of an intentional tort. Instead ... the activity is properly classified as reckless disregard of safety or reckless misconduct. Such reckless misconduct results when a person, with no intent to cause harm, intentionally performs an act so unreasonable and dangerous that he knows or should know, [sic] it is highly probable that harm will result.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“''Reckless misconduct differs from intentional wrongdoing in a very important particular. While an act to be reckless must be intended by the actor, the actor does not intend to cause the harm which results from it'”
2 later decisions 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.