Mayor v. Sheffield’s Empirical Analysis
71 U.S. 189 · 1866
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 1 district · 21 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 32 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 1942 · most notably Robert Workman v. Mayor Aldermen and Commonalty of the City of New York a (1900), Hill v. City of Boston (1877)
3 federal appellate · 1 district · 21 state decisions — followed in 14 states
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 32 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“If the authorities of a city or town have treated a place as a public street, taking charge of it and regulating it as they do other streets, and an individual is injured in consequence of the negligent and careless manner in which this is done, the corporation cannot, when it is sued for such injury, throw the party upon an. inquiry into the regularity of the proceedings by which the street was originally established.””
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.