95 Cal. App. 2d 708 - Kohn v. Kohn’s Empirical Analysis
1950
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 51 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 61 later decisions — most recently September 2017 · most notably 25 Cal. 3d 124 - Reynolds Metals Co. v. Alperson (1979), 39 Cal. 3d 290 - Mesler v. Bragg Management Co. (1985)
3 federal appellate · 51 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 Doyle v. Mitchell Bros. · Barham v. Barham · 20 Cal. 2d 839 - Stark v. Coker · 29 Cal. 2d 95 - Woodbine v. Van Horn · 20 Cal. 2d 814 - Tanner v. Title Insurance & Trust 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 61 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““As stated in 6A California Jurisprudence, page 75: ‘It is the law in California as elsewhere that, although a corporation is usually regarded as an entity separate and distinct from its stockholders, both law and equity will, when necessary to circumvent fraud, protect the rights of third persons and accomplish justice, disregard this distinct existence and treat them as identical.’ The issue is not so much whether, for all purposes, the corporation is the ‘alter ego’ of its stockholders or officers, nor whether the very purpose of the organization of the corporation was to defraud the individual who is now in court complaining, as it is an issue of whether in the particular case presented and for the purposes of such case justice and equity can best be accomplished and fraud and unfairness defeated by a disregard of the distinct entity of the corporate form. (1 Fletcher, Cyc. Corporations, pp. 134, 136, 143 and 165.) The case law of California is in support of this generally recognized view, the cases expressing the doctrine of disregard of the entity in varying language, sometimes rather broad and sometimes more narrow. The leading and most often cited case in California, Wenban Estate, Inc. v. Hewlett, 193 Cal. 675, 696 [ 227 P. 723 ] states it as follows: ‘While it is the general rule that a corporation is an entity-separate and distinct from its stockholders, with separate, distinct liabilities and obligations, nevertheless there is a well-recognized and firmly settled ”
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.