Thomas v. Pang’s Empirical Analysis
1991
Citation profile
28 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 28 later decisions — most recently November 2023 · most notably Juhl v. Airington (1997), Pinter v. American Family Mut. Ins. Co. (2000)
28 state decisions — followed in 13 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.
Relationships
Relies on 20 Cal. 3d 199 - Walters v. Sloan · Krauth v. Israel Geller and Buckingham Homes, Inc. · Berko v. Freda · Pickard v. City and County of Honolulu · Aravanis v. Eisenberg
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 28 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[I]t offends public policy to say that a citizen invites private liability merely because he happens to create a need for those public services.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“have had great difficulty in explaining the legal rationale upon which it rests, and have adopted various explanations to justify the result reached. Moreover, those courts have also riddled the rule with exceptions. When a rule of law is so difficult of explanation that courts adopting it have tried to buttress it with varying, shaky, legal explanations, and have shot ir full of exceptions, it is usually because the rule is unjust. That is the case here.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“[The rule's] ... most basic formulation is that a fire fighter or police officer may not recover damages from a private party for negligence in the creation of the reason for the safety officer's presence.... [T]he rule [we] adopt[ ] ... includes negligence in causing the incident requiring a safety officer's presence and those risks inherent in fulfilling the police or fire fighting duties.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Fordham v. Oldroyd
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.