Sidway v. Nichol’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

13 state decisions

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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““Our conclusion is that a married woman has, under our law, the right to purchase personal property, or borrow money for her separate use, and that the property purchased or money borrowed becomes her separate property. Her contract to pay for the same is a contract in reference to her separate property, and creates a'personal obligation, valid in law and in equity, and this without regard to whether she owned any additional property or not (citing cases.) To hold otherwise would be to say that, although the statute gives a married woman the right to acquire and hold property, yet, if she undertakes to acquire it by contract, the law will treat such contract as of no validity. Under that view of the statute, a married woman who had no separate estate could make no valid contract for the acquisition of property, however desirable and beneficial the ownership of it might be to her. If she was a seamstress and needed a sewing machine, or a music teacher and needed a piano, she could make no contract for a purchase upon credit. If she borrowed money with which to purchase property, her note given for the money would be void. This was her condition before the passage of the enabling acts. ' Such a construction, it seems to us, would, to a large extent, nullify the statutes which were intended to emancipate married women from many of the trammels of the common law, and permit them to contract for, acquire, and hold property.””

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Adair v. Arendt