Mercer County v. Hacket’s Empirical Analysis
68 U.S. 83 · 1863
Citation profile
17 federal appellate · 3 district · 34 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 112 later decisions (37 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 1996 · most notably Adickes v. S. H. Kress & Co. (1970), Burgess v. Seligman (1882)
17 federal appellate · 3 district · 34 state decisions — followed in 18 states
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 Woods v. Lawrence County
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 112 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A mere technical dogma of the courts or the common law cannot prohibit the commercial world from inventing or using any species of security not known in the last century. Usage of trade and commerce are acknowledged by courts as part of the common law, although they may have been unknown to Bracton and Blackstone. And this malleability, to suit the necessities and usages of the merchantile and commercial world, is one of the most valuable characteristics of the common law.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““If this decision of the learned court was founded on the construction of the Constitution or statute law of the state, or the peculiar law of Pennsylvania as to titles to land, we would have felt bound to follow; but we have often decided that on questions of mercantile or commercial law, or usages which are not peculiar to any place, we do not feel bound to yield our own judgment.””
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.