Holmes v. Kilgore’s Empirical Analysis
1925
Citation profile
6 federal appellate · 41 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 47 later decisions — most recently April 1989 · most notably United States Rubber Products, Inc. v. Clark (1941), Florida Power Corp. v. City of Tallahassee (1944)
6 federal appellate · 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.
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 47 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““It cannot be said that the contract in question is not ambiguous, but the theory of the law is against the destruction of contracts because of ambiguity, and we think this one may be construed to effectuate the reasonable intention of the parties. If no competent direct testimony is adduced to shed light on this intention, the court must then resort to the plain terms of the entire instrument, and in this connection he will be guided by the nature, subject-matter, and purpose of the contract. Such preliminary negotiations leading to it as can be ascertained, the surrounding circumstances supporting it, and the language in which it is expressed, may be considered.””
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.