Stanley v. Cobb’s Empirical Analysis
1986
Citation profile
6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 7 later decisions — most recently July 2011
6 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 41 Wash. App. 254 - Batdorf v. Transamerica Title Insurance · 581 F. Supp. 244 - Webb v. Insurance Co. of North America
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 7 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Read as a whole, the only reasonable interpretation of this section is that the insurer will defend any claim, but the defense obligation will terminate if and when the insurer’s policy limits are exhausted. These provisions are not subject to more than one reasonable interpretation. The policy in this regard is not ambiguous. This standard policy provision [“In addition to our limit of liability, we will pay all defense costs we incur”] simply means that defense costs will be paid separately by the insurer and will not be applied against its policy limits. . . . This language cannot be taken to mean that the company will continue to pay defense costs once its policy limits have been exhausted, and in fact the very next sentence of the policy expressly states that this will not be the case. Once again, these sentences must be construed together, and when they are so construed there is no ambiguity.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“In view of the stated two options, this Court is of the opinion that the limit of liability may not be exhausted in a manner other than that specified by the policy, ie., to either settle or defend.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.