Benedick v. Potts’s Empirical Analysis
1898
Citation profile
4 federal appellate · 7 district · 147 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 162 later decisions — most recently December 2015 · most notably McGrath v. St. Louis Transit Co. (1906), 50 Md. App. 226 - Jensen v. American Motors Corp., Inc. (1981)
4 federal appellate · 7 district · 147 state decisions — followed in 16 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.
Relationships
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 162 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““As an injury may occur from causes other than the negligence of the party sued, it is obvious that before a liability on account of that injury can be fastened upon a particular individual, it must be shown, or there must be evidence legally tending to show, that he is responsible for it; that is, that he has been guilty of the negligence that produced or occasioned the injury. In no instance can the bare fact that an injury has happened, of itself and divorced from all the surrounding circumstances, justify the inference that the injury was caused by negligence. It is true that direct proof of negligence is not necessary. Like any other fact, negligence may be established by the proof of circumstances from which its existence may be inferred. But this inference must, after all, be a legitimate inference and not a mere speculation or conjecture. There must be a logical relation and connection between the circumstances proved and the conclusion sought to be adduced from them. This principle is never departed from, and in the very nature of things it never can be disregarded.””
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“is not an attempt to infer negligence from an apparent cause, but to infer the cause of the injury from the naked fact of injury, and then to superadd the further inference that this inferred cause proceeded from negligence.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“To entitle a plaintiff to recover in an action of this kind, he must show not only that he has sustained an injury, but that the defendant has been guilty of some negligence which produced that particular injury.”
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.