Dougherty v. Bethune’s Empirical Analysis
1849
Citation profile
13 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently October 2016
13 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.
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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[The act] is conclusive as to all legal rights which may exist under its provisions. But so far as it recites facts, it is not a law, and the Courts are not bound to recognize it as such. The Legislature has no power to legislate the truth of facts. Whether facts upon which rights depend, are true or false, is an inquiry for the Courts to make,... it belongs to the judicial department of the Government. By the Constitution, the legislative and judicial departments are distinct. A citizen is not estopped to deny, in the Courts of the country, any mere fact which the Legislature may choose to recite. If he was, the Government would be a despotism, and the Legislature might be a tyrant.”
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.