Somers v. Thurman’s Empirical Analysis
109 F.3d 614 · 1997
Citation profile
29 federal appellate · 4 district · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 59 later decisions — most recently October 2015 · most notably Sanchez v. Pereira-Castillo (2009), Robinson v. Solano County (2002)
29 federal appellate · 4 district · 1 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
Applies 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Anderson v. Creighton · Mitchell v. Forsyth · Bell v. Wolfish · Malley v. Briggs
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 59 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“we cannot assume from the fact that the searches cause immense anguish that they therefore violate protected Fourth Amendment interests. Far from it, our prior case law suggests that prisoners’ legitimate expectations of bodily privacy from persons of the opposite sex are extremely limited.... Although the inmates here may have protected privacy interests in freedom from cross-gender clothed body searches, such interests have not yet been judicially recognized.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“A right of privacy in traditional Fourth Amendment terms is fundamentally incompatible with the close and continual surveillance of inmates and their cells required to ensure institutional security and internal order. We are satisfied that society would insist that the prisoner’s expectation of privacy always yield to what must be considered the paramount interest in institutional security.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“As the court said in Somers , “Government officials are not required to anticipate subsequent legal developments, and ... cannot fairly be said to “know” the law unless it is sufficiently unmistakable from authoritative sources. It is not even enough to demonstrate that the constitutional norm relied on is the logical extension of principles and decisions already in the books.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.