Merrill v. Roberts’s Empirical Analysis
1890
Citation profile
39 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 39 later decisions — most recently July 1959 · most notably Freeman v. Freeman (1959), Smith v. Ferrell (1932)
39 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 39 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Relief will not be granted unless the party seeking it can show that he was prevented from making a valid defense to the action in which the judgment has been rendered' against Mm by fraud, accident, or the act of the opposite party, unmixed with fault or negligence on his part.””
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.