Sumners v. Sumners’s Empirical Analysis
1985
Citation profile
45 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 45 later decisions — most recently December 2018 · most notably Rodriguez v. Suzuki Motor Corp. (1996), Taylor v. Taylor (2000)
45 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 Murphy v. Carron · Linkletter v. Walker · Chevron Oil Co. v. Huson · Great Northern Ry Co v. Sunburst Oil & Refining Co · United States v. Schooner Peggy
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 45 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is in the general true that the province of an appellate court is only to inquire whether a judgment when rendered was erroneous or not. But if, subsequent to the judgment, and before the decision of the appellate court, a law intervenes and positively changes the rule which governs, the law must be obeyed, or its obligation denied.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“[T]he [cjourt must balance the interests of those who may be affected by the change in the law, weighing the degree to which parties may have relied upon the old rule and the hardship that might result to those parties from the retrospective operation of the new rule against the possible hardship to those parties who would be denied the benefit of the new rule.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“2. For purposes of sections 452.300 to 452.415 only, “marital property” means all property acquired by either spouse subsequent to the marriage except: (1) Property acquired by gift, bequest, devise, or descent; (2) Property acquired in exchange for property acquired prior to the marriage or in exchange for property acquired by gift, bequest, devise, or descent; (3) Property acquired by a spouse after a decree of legal separation; (4) Property excluded by valid agreement of the parties; and (5) The increase in value of property acquired prior to the marriage.”
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.