Hornsby v. United States’s Empirical Analysis
77 U.S. 224 · 1869
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 3 district · 3 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 40 later decisions (21 by the Supreme Court) — most recently September 2013 · most notably Maxwell Land-Grant Case (1887), Slidell v. Grandjean (1884)
3 federal appellate · 3 district · 3 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 40 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“As we have had occasion to observe in several instances, grants of the public domain of Mexico, made by governors of the department of California, were of three kinds: 1st, grants by specific boundaries, where the donee was entitled to the whole tract described; 2d, grants by quantity, as of one or more leagues situated at some designated place, or within a larger tract described by outboundaries, where the donee was entitled out of the general tract only to the quantity specified; and, 3d, grants of places by name, where the donee was entitled to the tract named according to the limits, as shown by its settlement and possession, or other competent evidence. The greater part of the grants which have come before this court for examination have belonged to the second class.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“grants made to empresarios, for them to colonize with many families.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“As we have had occasion to observe in several instances,”
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.