Stevenson v. Colgan’s Empirical Analysis
1891
Citation profile
1 district · 86 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 87 later decisions — most recently January 2014 · most notably People Ex Rel. Chapman v. Sacramento Drainage Dist. (1909), Los Angeles County Flood Control District v. Hamilton (1917)
1 district · 86 state decisions — followed in 19 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
Relies on Rumsey v. . the People · Hovey v. Foster · Lusher v. Scites · De Camp v. Eveland
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 87 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“While the courts have undoubted power to declare a statute invalid when it appears to them, in the course of judicial action, to be in conflict with the constitution, yet they can only do so when the question arises as a pure question of law, unmixed with matters of fact, the existence of which must be determined upon a trial, and as the result of, it may be, conflicting evidence.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“denied to the Legislature the right to make direct appropriations to individuals from general considerations of charity or gratitude, or because of some supposed moral obligation....”
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.