Pepper v. Telegraph Co.’s Empirical Analysis
1889
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 18 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 19 later decisions — most recently June 1962
1 federal appellate · 18 state decisions — followed in 12 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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““The telegraph company is in no sense a private agent. It is clothed by the state with certain privileges; it is allowed to exercise the right of eminent domain. In exchange for such franchises it is onerated with certain duties, one of which is the obligation to accept, and transmit over its wires, all messages delivered to it for that purpose. The parties who resort to this instrumentality have no other means of obtaining the benefits of rapid communication, which is the price of its existence. They have no opportunity and no power to supervise or direct the manner or means which the company use in the discharge of their duties to the public in the transmission of messages for particular individuals. They can only deliver to the company a legible copy of what they wish communicated, with no expectation that such paper is to be carried to the party addressed; and their connection with the company there and then ceases. They have contracted with the company to transmit the words of the message to the party addressed, through its own agents, and with its own means. The party receiving the message knows that he is not obtaining any communication direct from the sender, but that he is receiving what the company has taken, and changed the form of, from the paper on which it was written, transmitted by electricity over the wires of the company', and reduced to writing at its destination by an agent of the company; and that it only represents what was written by the sender, in the ”
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.