Berten v. Pierce’s Empirical Analysis
1991
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently December 2014
2 federal appellate · 6 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 Appelhans v. Goldman · Switzer v. Switzer · Harrison v. Weller · Dockery v. Mannisi · DeMoulin v. Kissir
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 10 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“That doctrine holds that causation may be inferred by a lay jury, without expert evidence, where the obvious symptoms of the injury follow the trauma immediately, or with only short delay, and the injury is the kind that is normally sustained in the kind of trauma being considered. The lay jury by its common sense and experience may reliably find that the injury occurred as a result of the trauma. The most obvious cases for the application of the doctrine are those where a person is involved in a violent accident and sustains a broken bone, or an open wound. It has also been applied in cases of back pain.”
3 later decisions 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.