Vaughn v. English’s Empirical Analysis
1857
Citation profile
16 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently July 1996
16 state decisions — followed in 11 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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Officers are public or private, and it is said every man is a public officer who hath any duty concerning the public, and he is not the less a public officer where his authority is confined to narrow limits, because it is the duty of his office and the nature of that duty which makes him a public officer, and not the extent of his authority. (Jacobs’s Law Dict. vol. 4, p. 438.) ” (Vaughn v. English, 8 Cal. 41 .) Burrill’s Law Dictionary, a standard of authority at the time at which this provision was incorporated into the organic law of the several states, holds that an office is:”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.