Little v. Williams’s Empirical Analysis
1908
Citation profile
1 federal appellate · 1 district · 29 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 32 later decisions — most recently February 1984 · most notably Little v. Williams (1913), Chavis v. Henry (1943)
1 federal appellate · 1 district · 29 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 Hardin v. Jordan · Jefferis v. East Omaha Land Co. · Cragin v. Powell · Mitchell v. Smale · Michigan Land & Lumber Co. v. Rust
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 32 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““Descriptions of lands, according to terminology employed in the system of governmental surveys and plats of lands, is necessarily a reference to the plats of those surveys; for those terms are meaningless unless so considered with reference to the surveys and plats. There is nothing known of townships, sections, and part of sections of lands, except such as are described in the plats of the government surveys. Therefore, giving the word ‘township,’ used in the stipulation of facts, the meaning which we must attribute to the parties who employed the term, it has reference to the townships surveyed and platted by the government surveyors, and means the townships according to the surveys and plats. A conveyance of the township ‘according to plat of the survey’ does not include lands which do not appear on the plat of the surveys. We do not mean to hold that the unsurveyed land could not have been selected as swamp lands and patented to the' state by the use of proper descriptive terms in the patent; but this was not accomplished by reference to townships, sections, or parts thereof according to the plat of the surveys, when the unsurveyed land did not appear on the plats at all. The plats showed it to be water, and not land.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority““Courts take cognizance, judicially of the general system of government surveys, and, accordingly, we know that lands are surveyed and platted into sections and parts of sections and into fractionals where they abut on streams or other bodies of water. The record in this case contains a plat and the field notes of the governmental surveys of. the land surrounding Walker’s lake, and they confirm the facts of which we are already judicially cognizant. . . . Description of lands, according to terminology employed in the system of governmental surveys and plats of lands, is necessarily a reference to the"plats of those surveys; . . . Therefore, giving the word ‘township’, used in the stipulation of facts the meaning which we must attribute to the parties who employed the term, it has reference to the townships surveyed and platted by the government surveyors, and means the townships according to the surveys and plats.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Greenblum v. Gregory
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.