O'Connor v. Davis’s Empirical Analysis
126 F.3d 112 · 1997
Citation profile
30 federal appellate · 8 district · 5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 87 later decisions — most recently May 2025 · most notably Llampallas v. Mini-Circuits, Lab, Inc. (1998), York v. Association of the Bar (2002)
30 federal appellate · 8 district · 5 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 Anderson v. Liberty Lobby, Inc. · Nationwide Mutual Insurance v. Darden · Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid · Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools · North Haven Board of Education v. Bell
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 87 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In determining whether a hired party is an employee under the general common law of agency, we consider the hiring party’s right to control the manner and means by which the product is accomplished. Among the other factors relevant to this inquiry are the skill required; the source of the instrumentalities and tools; the location of the work; the duration of the relationship between the parties; whether the hiring party has the right to assign additional projects to the hired party; the extent of the hired party’s discretion over when and how long to work; the method of payment; the hired party’s role in hiring and paying assistants; whether the work is part of the regular business of the hiring party; whether the hiring party is in business; the provision of employee benefits; and the tax treatment of the hired party.”
12 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[W]e think that this analysis is flawed because it ignores the antecedent question of whether O’Connor was hired by Rockland for any purpose. As the Supreme Court suggests, the common feature shared by both the employee and the independent contractor is that they are hired parties, and thus, a prerequisite to considering whether an individual is one or the other under common-law agency principles is that the individual have been hired in the first instance. That is, only where a “hire” has occurred should the common-law agency analysis be undertaken. Where no financial benefit is obtained by the purported employee from the employer, no plausible employment relationship of any sort can be said to exist because although compensation by the putative employer to the putative employee in exchange for his services is not a sufficient condition, it is an essential condition to the existence of an employer-employee relationship.”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Factors that could lead to [this] conclusion ... [might include]: the two entities have [an] institutional affiliation; there is [a] written agreement binding the two entities in [some] way; [their] staff [is] shared; [or] funds are circulated between them....”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.