No. 82-1559’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

1 state decisions

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 3 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “The underlying conceptual problem in substantive crash-worthiness doctrine precisely concerns identification of the accident-occurrence upon which the proximate causation inquiry is to be focused. Is it the initial impact of vehicle with some external object — another vehicle, a tree, a ditchbank— that sets in train a series of traumatic ‘crashes’? Or is it the specific physical trauma traceable to second (and third, etc.) ‘crashes’ that are in turn arguably traceable in causal terms to design defects that concededly have no causal relation to the ‘first crash’? Courts that reject crashworthiness doctrine are likely to do so by a purely conceptual analysis that identifies the first impact as the sole accident-occurrence upon which proximate causation injury is rightly focused, with liability for all direct and consequential damages flowing from that impact (including all ensuing ‘crashes’) then being imposed solely upon the actor whose negligence proximately caused that impact.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 93 N.C. App. 92 - Warren v. Colombo

2. “... North Carolina courts have not [adopted] such doctrinal expansions as strict liability and comparative negligence. While to some this may appear unenlightened, it may to others reflect a completely respectable and deep-seated attitude of judicial restraint and deference to legislative primacy in making significant changes in the long-established common law tort doctrine. In any event, judicial restraint in these related areas is a fact that must be taken into account by a federal diversity court in assessing the probable view of North Carolina’s appellate courts on the propriety of judicially adopting the crashworthiness doctrine.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Barron v. Ford Motor Co.