Phipps v. Sedgwick’s Empirical Analysis
95 U.S. 3 · 1877
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 8 district · 9 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 39 later decisions (7 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 1941 · most notably United States v. Carter (1910), Western Union Telegraph Co. v. James (1896)
2 federal appellate · 8 district · 9 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 39 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“■‘While the hooks of reports are full of cases in which real or personal properly conveyed to llie wife in fraud of the husband’s creditors has been pur sued and subjected to tbe payment of bis debts after it bad been identified in lier bands, or in the hands of voluntary grantees or purchasers with notice we are not aware of any well-considered case of high authority where the pursuit of the property has been abandoned, and a judgment in personam for its value taken against the wife. Certainly no such doctrine is sanctioned by the common law; and-, though vhe present suit is a bill in chancery, the decree in this case is nothing more than a judgment at law, and could as well have been maintained in a separate suit at law for the money as in this suit. And the liability of the executors o>f the wife to this personal judgment must depend on the same principle as if, abandoning the pursuit of the res, the assignee had brought a suit at law for the money. The statutes of the different states have gone very far in this country to modify the peculiar relations of husband and wife, as they existed at common law, in reference to their property; but they have not, except perhaps in Louisiana, gone so far as to recognize the civil-law rule of perfect independence in dealing with each other. While the statutes of New Xork have recognized certain rights of the wife to deal with and contract in reference to her separate property, they fall -far short of establishing the principle that”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.