Merling v. Commonwealth’s Empirical Analysis
1983
Citation profile
8 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 9 later decisions — most recently June 2024
8 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.
Relationships
Relies on Laudenberger v. Port Auth. of Allegheny · General Electric Credit Corp. v. Aetna Casualty & Surety Co. · Reardon v. Meehan · Moseley v. Reading Co.
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 9 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(b) Acts which may impose liability.—The following acts by a Commonwealth party may result in the imposition of liability on the Commonwealth and the defense of sovereign immunity shall not be raised to claims for damages caused by: * * * * (5) Potholes and other dangerous conditions. —A dangerous condition of highways under the jurisdiction of a Commonwealth agency created by potholes or sinkholes or other similar conditions created by natural elements, except that the claimant to recover must establish that the dangerous condition created a reasonably foreseeable risk of the kind of injury which was incurred and that the Commonwealth agency had actual written notice of the dangerous condition of the highway a sufficient time prior to the event to have taken measures to protect against the dangerous condition. Property damages shall not be recoverable under this paragraph. (Emphasis added.)”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“DOT next complains of the trial judges exclusion of evidence concerning, and the trial judges refusal to charge on the subject of, DOTs budgetary limitations and maintenance priorities. These subjects, it says, were relevant to the subject of whether DOT failed in its duty to take measures to protect against the dangerous conditions of the state highway involved in this case. We are provided with no authority for this thesis. It seems to be quite fallacious. The fact that the Commonwealth in the statute waiving its immunity places a limitation on the amount of damages recoverable against it (42 Pa. C. S. §8528(b)), belies DOTs contention that there should be an additional limitation on the amount of damages. . . .”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“It is generally agreed that when a potential witness is available and appears to have special information relevant to the case, so that his testimony would not merely be cumulative, and where his relationship with one of the parties is such that the witness would ordinarily be expected to favor him, then if such party does not produce his testimony, the inference arises that it would have been unfavorable.”
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.