Harp v. Gourley’s Empirical Analysis
1961
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 32 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 38 later decisions — most recently April 2020 · most notably Maxwell v. Fidelity Financial Services, Inc. (1995), Jernigan v. New Amsterdam Casualty Company (1961)
6 federal appellate · 32 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 Towne v. Eisner · 4 Cal. 2d 128 - Brant v. California Dairies, Inc. · Michelson v. House · McLain v. Haley · 11 Cal. 2d 322 - Wachs v. Wachs
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 38 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The trial court should therefore have permitted appellant to plead and prove the surrounding circumstances, not for the purpose of varying the terms of the written instrument, but for the purpose of aiding the court in interpreting the contract of the parties as embodied in the written instrument.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority““A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.””
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.