110 Cal. App. 4th 1122 - Weinberg v. Feisel’s Empirical Analysis
2003
Citation profile
8 federal appellate · 4 district · 82 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 100 later decisions — most recently February 2025 · most notably 159 Cal. App. 4th 1027 - NYGÅRD, INC. v. Uusi-Kerttula (2008), 121 Cal. App. 4th 883 - Wilbanks v. Wolk (2004)
8 federal appellate · 4 district · 82 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 Connick v. Myers · Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. · Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization · Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. v. Greenmoss Builders, Inc. · Hutchinson v. Proxmire
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 100 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“First, “public interest” does not equate with mere curiosity. Second, a matter of public interest should be something of concern to a substantial number of people. Thus, a matter of concern to the speaker and a relatively small, specific audience is not a matter of public interest. Third, there should be some degree of closeness between the challenged statements and the asserted public interest; the assertion of a broad and amorphous public interest is not sufficient. Fourth, the focus of the speaker’s conduct should be the public interest rather than a mere effort to gather ammunition for another round of private controversy. Finally, ... [a] person cannot turn otherwise private information into a matter of public interest simply by communicating it to a large number of people.”
11 later decisions quote this exact passage“[the defendant's] dispute with plaintiff was ... a private dispute between private parties”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“private campaign . . . to discredit [the] plaintiff in the eyes of a relatively small group of fellow collectors”
2 later decisions 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.