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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2010
Most court opinions are like actors: the older they get, the less people pay attention to them. For instance, the case immediately after Pierson v. Post in volume 3 of Caines's Reports is called Hollingsworth v. Napier. It was an important case in its day, much more important than Pierson v. Post, because it involved a recurring question of commercial law: what rights, if any, did a seller retain in goods stored in a public warehouse after he had delivered a bill of sale to the buyer? Hollingsworth went on to be cited in forty court opinions distributed fairly evenly through the 1870s, but then its career was over. It was cited twice in the 1880s, once in 1892, and never again.
1. Hollingsworth v. Napier, 3 Caines 182 (1805).
2. Apart from Angela Fernandez's article in this volume, these include Angela Fernandez, “The Pushy Pedagogy of Pierson v. Post and the Fading Federalism of James Kent,” http://ssrn.com/abstract=984163 ; McDowell, Andrea, “Legal Fictions in Pierson v. Post,” Michigan Law Review 105 (2007): 735–77Google Scholar; Berger, Bethany R., “It's Not About the Fox: The Untold History of Pierson v. Post,” Duke Law Journal 55 (2006): 1089–1143Google Scholar; and Dharmapala, Dhammika and Pitchford, Rohan, “An Economic Analysis of ‘Riding to Hounds’: Pierson v. Post Revisited,” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 18 (2002): 39–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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