Miller v. Watt & Walker’s Empirical Analysis
1883
Citation profile
5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 5 later decisions — most recently October 1978
5 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 5 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“If an agent buy in his own name, without disclosing his principal and the seller subsequently discover that the purchase was in fact made for another, he may, at his choice, look for payment either to the agent or the principal, and that too, notwithstanding the title had been made to the agent, and he debited with the account. On the other hand, if at the time of the sale, the seller knows, not only the person who is nominally dealing with him is not principal but agent, and also knows who the principal really is, and, notwithstanding all the knowledge, chooses to make the agent his debtor, dealing with him and him alone, the seller must be taken to have abandoned his recourse against the principal, and cannot afterwards, upon failure of the agent, turn round and charge the principal. having once made his election at the time when he had the power of choosing between the one and the other.”
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.