Erwin v. Smith’s Empirical Analysis
1895
Citation profile
7 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 7 later decisions — most recently February 2016
7 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 7 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“This is true although they may express a meaning entirely at variance with the real intention of the testator. [Thus], a legacy to the sons of a testator’s daughter could not be changed into a legacy to the daughters of a testator’s son, although he had grandchildren of both classes and a hundred witnesses were offered to prove he really meant the legacy for the latter instead of the former, as declared in the will itself.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Banner v. Vandeford
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.