Sergeant v. Denby’s Empirical Analysis
1890
Citation profile
1 district · 37 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 44 later decisions — most recently August 2012 · most notably West Alexandria Properties, Inc. v. First Virginia Mortgage & Real Estate Investment Trust (1980), United Masonry, Inc. v. Jefferson Mews, Inc. (1977)
1 district · 37 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.
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 44 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““It is clear, therefore, that, as between the general contractors and the owner, the two buildings must be considered as, in effect, one piece of work, and that the right of the former to a joint lien on both for any balance due them, upon complying with the terms of the statute, could not have been successfully controverted. Indeed, in such a case, the lien must be joint or not at all; for although a lien is a creature of the statute, it must have its foundation in a contract. Hence it must correspond with the contract, as has been decided by other courts in analogous cases upon statutes similar to ours.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“a sufficient foundation for the lien asserted.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.