68 Wash. 2d 368 - Dickson v. Hausman’s Empirical Analysis
1966
Citation profile
2 district · 15 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 19 later decisions — most recently July 2014
2 district · 15 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 65 Wash. 2d 817 - Bignold v. King County · 44 Wash. 2d 488 - Boeing Airplane Co. v. Firemen's Fund Indemnity Co. · 37 Wash. 2d 79 - Ball v. Stokely Foods, Inc. · 37 Wash. 2d 185 - Burch v. Rice · 22 Wash. 2d 391 - In Re Garrity's Estate
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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In ascertaining the intention of the parties to a written instrument, the courts must look to the wording of the instrument itself as made by the parties, view it as a whole, and consider all of the circumstances surrounding the transaction together with the interpretation of the instrument by the parties themselves as indicated by their subsequent acts. [Citing case.] Clements v. Olsen, 46 Wn.2d 445, 449 , 282 P.2d 266 (1955). Accord, In re Garrity’s Estate, 22 Wn.2d 391 , 156 P.2d 217 (1945), and Burch v. Rice, 37 Wn.2d 185 , 222 P.2d 847 (1950). The primary factor to be considered in determining the meaning of a written contract is the intention of the parties, and that intention normally is to be ascertained largely from the language employed by them. [Citing case.] Where the terms of a contract taken as a whole are plain and unambiguous, the meaning of the contract is to be deduced from its language alone, and it is unnecessary for a court to resort to any aids to construction. [Citing cases.] But where the language of a contract is ambiguous or susceptible of more than one meaning, it is the duty of the court to search out the intent of the parties by viewing the contract as a whole and considering all of the circumstances surrounding the transaction, including the subject-matter and the subsequent acts of the parties. [Citing cases.] Boeing Airplane Co., v. Firemen’s Fund Indem. Co., 44 Wn.2d 488, 496 , 268 P.2d 654 , 45 A.L.R.2d 984 (1954).”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.