Lawton v. Joesting’s Empirical Analysis
1905
Citation profile
16 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 16 later decisions — most recently July 2004
16 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 Miller v. Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad · Witt v. St. Paul & Northern Pacific Railway Co. · Flaten v. Moorhead · Fairchild v. City of St. Paul · Tingue v. Patch
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 16 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“* * * Technical rules of construction are not favored, and are not to be so applied as to defeat the intention of the parties; for, as was said in Witt v. St. Paul & N.P. Ry. Co., 38 Minn. 122 , ( 35 N.W. Rep. 862 ,) such rules of construction, in modern times, have given way to the more sensible rule, which is, in all cases, to give effect to the intention of the parties, if practicable, when no principle of law is thereby violated. Too much stress is not to be laid on the grammatical construction or forms of expression used. The cardinal rule of construction is to ascertain and give effect to the intention of the parties to the instrument; and, to this end, the court must consider all parts of it, and the construction must be upon the entire deed, and not upon disjointed parts. And, if the language is ambiguous, resort may be had to evidence of the surrounding circumstances, and the situation of the parties, if necessary, in order to throw light upon their intention.”
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.