Wheaton v. Beecher’s Empirical Analysis
1887
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 9 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 11 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2019
1 federal appellate · 9 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 Hamilton v. . Eno · Johnson v. Brown · Commonwealth v. Clap · Root v. King & Verplanck · Bailey v. Kalamazoo Publishing 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 11 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““There is no doubt that when a man in this country becomes a candidate for an office, elective or appointive, his character for honesty and integrity, and his qualifications and fitness for the position, are put before the people, and are thereby made proper subjects for comment, and that publications of the truth in regard to the candidate are not libelous; and it is equally true that the publication of falsehood against such candidate is wrong, and deserves to be punished.””
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Belknap v. Ball
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.