Mississippi and Missouri Railroad Company v. Ward’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

62 federal appellate · 19 district · 14 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 172 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““But tho want of a sufficient amount of damage having been sustained to give the federal courts jurisdiction will not defeat the remedy, as the removal of the obstruction is the matter of controversy, and the value of the object must govern.” Mississippi, etc., Railroad v. Ward, 67 U. S. 485 , 492, 17 L. Ed. 311 .”

   5 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. Louisville & N. R. Co. v. Smith · Chesapeake & Delaware Canal Co. v. Gring

2. ““The bridge is 1,570 feet long, and the number of piers is six. Three of them are on the Iowa side of the river. The draw pier is the fourth. It is 386 feet long at its bottom, and 45 feet wide. The draw space on the Iowa side is 111 feet and on the Illinois side 116 feet wide in the clear. The distance from center to center of the small piers is 257 feet. The long pier stands at an angle with the thread of the current of about 24 degrees, and the small piers are nearly on a line with the thread of the current. The Illinois draw passage is directly over the deepest channel, of the, river, and directly over the usual track of steamboats before the bridge was built. The Mississippi is about 1,410 feet wide at the bridge, and the middle of 'the river is about 80 feet westwardly of the long pier. The Illinois draw passage (116 feet), and width of the long pier (45 feet), and the 80 feet between it and the eastern line of Iowa, cover a space of 240 feet of water way, and which embraces the main channel, where steamboats have at all times navigated. It was at the long pier, and in the Illinois draw east of that pier, that the complainant’s boats sustained the injuries on which he founded his right to sue the Iowa corporation, and to proceed against the bridge in rem as a public nuisance. An indictment could only have been prosecuted against the owner for keeping up the nuisance in Illinois in the courts of that state, because the nuisance was a trespass and crime against the laws o”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Columbia River Packers' Ass'n v. McGowan