Melo v. Hafer’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

21 federal appellate · 9 district · 1 state decisions

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 54 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[A]n employee may be found to have acted within the scope of his or her employment as long as the employee was at least partially actuated by a purpose to serve the employer. There is no requirement that serving the employer must be the employee’s only purpose or even the employee’s primary purpose. Rather, an employee’s conduct is not within the scope of his or her employment if it is too little actuated by a purpose to serve the employer or if it is motivated entirely by the employee’s own purposes (that is, the employee stepped aside from the prosecution of the employer’s business to accomplish an independent purpose of his or her own).”

   6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Stokes v. Cross · 748 F. Supp. 2d 445 - Lackro v. Kao

2. “a trial court's function is to ascertain whether disputed facts exist, not to try them.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Jarvis v. Government of the Virgin Islands · Taboas v. Mlynczak

3. “Finally, to us it is of no moment that the statute refers to “the incident out of which the claim arose.” It is an accident of language — a reflection of the most common case — that the statute posits a “happening.” In this case the Attorney General concluded, as evidenced by the certificate, that the events claimed by plaintiff did not occur, at least in the form alleged by Wood. But it is not difficult to find here a set of “incidents” or occurrences conceded by everyone: Owens did have a supervisory relationship with Wood, met and talked with her on various occasions and danced with her at an official function. What is disputed is precisely what was said and done on these occasions, much as a government driver and a private plaintiff might give two quite different versions of an accident. Indeed, we think the Westfall Act would apply even if there were less of an “incident” than is indisputably present in this case. For example, surely the statute ap- • plies with the same force whether a postal service driver says that he did not hit the plaintiffs car or that he did so but was not at fault. “Incident,” in other words, must encompass the possibility that something did not happen as well as the possibility that it did.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Kimbro v. Velten