90 N.C. App. 699 - Williams v. Odell’s Empirical Analysis
1988
Citation profile
20 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 22 later decisions — most recently June 2019
20 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 Dickinson v. Pake · Summey v. Cauthen · Smith v. Fiber Controls Corp. · Exum v. Boyles · Norwood v. Sherwin-Williams Co.
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 22 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The first element is satisfied by a showing that plaintiff’s prior contributory negligence ha[d] placed [him] in a position from which [he was] powerless to extricate [himjself. The situation is not one of true helplessness, as the injured party is in a position to escape. Rather, the negligence consists of failure to pay attention to one’s surroundings and discover his own peril.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[t]he last clear chance doctrine is [ ] inapplicable where the injured party is at all times in control of the danger and simply chooses to take the risk.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[was] unusual in that [the] plaintiff made the motion for [a] directed verdict on [the] defendants' defense of contributory negligence at the close of all the evidence at trial. In most cases that set out the applicable standard of review, the defendant moves for a directed verdict on its affirmative defense that the plaintiff is barred from recovery as a result of [the] plaintiff's contributory negligence. Thus, the evidence viewed in the light most favorable to the non-moving party[ ] is normally viewed in the light most favorable to the plaintiff. Here, however, the evidence must be considered in the light most favorable to [the] defendants, since [the] plaintiff was the moving party. Therefore, if there is more than a scintilla of evidence supporting each element of [the] [defendants'] claim that [the] plaintiff was contributorily negligent, then the issue should have been submitted for the jury to decide.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Proffitt v. Gosnell
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.