French v. Pearce’s Empirical Analysis
1831
Citation profile
55 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 56 later decisions — most recently October 2022 · most notably Finlay v. Swirsky (1925), City of Rock Springs v. Sturm (1929)
55 state decisions — followed in 25 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 56 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“An occupation of land, by the defendant as his own, under the plaintiff's eye, to what he supposed to be the dividing line between him and the plaintiff, and which, for many years, the plaintiff permitted without a question, from the mutual assent of the parties, is strong presumptive evidence of the true place of the line. . . By adverse possession is meant a possession hostile to the title of another; or, in other words, a disseisin of the premises; and by disseisin is understood an unwarrantable entry, putting the true owner out of his seisin.”
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.