Pittsburgh Construction Co. v. Griffith’s Empirical Analysis
2003
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 1 district · 41 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 74 later decisions — most recently May 2025 · most notably Commonwealth v. Topa (1977), 2005 Pa. Super. 328 - Hart v. Arnold (2005)
1 federal appellate · 1 district · 41 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 Cooper v. Delaware Valley Medical Center · 411 Pa. Super. 347 - Bash v. Bell Telephone Co. · 2002 Pa. Super. 347 - Etoll, Inc. v. Elias/Savion Advertising, Inc. · Bohler-Uddeholm America, Inc. v. Ellwood Group, Inc. · Commonwealth v. Dennis
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 74 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]o permit a promisee to sue his promisor in tort for breaches of contract inter se would erode the usual rules of contractual recovery and inject confusion into our well-settled forms of actions.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage“Conversion is a tort by which the defendant deprives the plaintiff of his right to a chattel or interferes with the plaintiffs use or possession of a chattel without plaintiffs consent and without lawful justification. A plaintiff has a cause of action in conversion if he or she had actual or constructive possession of a chattel at the time of the alleged conversion. Money may be the subject of conversion. However the failure to pay a debt is not conversion. In general, courts are cautious about permitting tort recovery based on contractual breaches. In keeping with this principle, this court has recognized the ‘gist of the action’ doctrine, which operates to preclude a plaintiff from recasting ordinary breach of contract claims into tort claims. [[Image here]] However, a breach of contract may give rise to an actionable tort where the wrong ascribed to the defendant is the gist of the action, the contract being collateral. [[Image here]] In other words, a claim should be limited to a contract claim when the parties’ obligations are defined by the terms of the contracts, and not by the larger social policies embodied by the law of torts.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“(1) aris[e] solely from a contract between the parties; (2) when the duties allegedly breached were created and grounded in the contract itself; (3) where the liability stems from a contract; or (4) when the tort claim essentially duplicates a breach of contract claim or the success of which is wholly dependent on the terms of a contract.”
2 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.