69 N.C. App. 323 - Murphy v. McIntyre’s Empirical Analysis
1984
Citation profile
38 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 42 later decisions — most recently January 2022 · most notably 174 N.C. App. 266 - Good Hope Hospital, Inc. v. North Carolina Department of Health & Human Services (2005), 129 N.C. App. 305 - Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson, P.A. v. Smith (1998)
38 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
Applies 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Childress v. Abeles · Smith v. Ford Motor Co. · Presnell v. Pell · Still v. Lance · Coleman v. . Whisnant
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 42 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A person acts with legal malice if he does a * wrongful act or exceeds his legal right or authority in order to prevent the continuation of the contract between the parties.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“Indeed, actual malice and freedom from liability for this tort may coexist. If the outsider has a sufficient lawful reason for inducing the breach of contract, he is exempt from liability for so doing, no matter how malicious in actuality his conduct may be. A “malicious motive makes a bad act worse but it cannot make that wrong which, in its own essence, is lawful.””
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.