Little v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1997
Citation profile
48 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 55 later decisions — most recently December 2018 · most notably HECI Exploration Co. v. Neel (1999), Frost National Bank v. Fernandez (2010)
48 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedthe decision below (from Texas Court of Appeals, 5th District (Dallas))
Relationships
Relies on Lalli v. Lalli · Greater Houston Transportation Co. v. Phillips · Moreno v. Sterling Drug, Inc. · S.V. v. R.V. · Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc.
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 55 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“the need for finality of probate proceedings is well recognized by this and other courts”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“In many cases, however, adoptees may be unable to timely assert inheritance rights, even with the exercise of the utmost diligence. Not all adoptees may know that they are adopted within the applicable limitations period. Even if they know that they are adopted, they may not know where they were born or, more to the point, where the adoption proceedings occurred, so that they may attempt to obtain access to their birth records. Conducting a meaningful search for your identity is difficult if you do not know where to begin that search. And assuming an adoptee found the correct court to petition, that court could well refuse to open adoption records if the only basis for doing so was to allow the adoptee to see if any inheritance claims existed.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority““Notice in law is of two kinds — actual and constructive____ In common parlance, ‘actual notice’ generally consists in express information of a fact, but in law the term is much more comprehensive. In law whatever fairly puts a person on inquiry is sufficient notice, where the means of knowledge are at hand, which if pursued by the proper inquiry the full truth might have been ascertained. Means of knowledge with the duty of using them are in equity equivalent to knowledge itself.... So that, in legal parlance, actual knowledge embraces those things of which the one sought to be charged has express information, and likewise those things which a reasonably diligent inquiry and exercise of the means of information at hand would have disclosed.””
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.