Maggert v. Hanks’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

6 federal appellate · 2 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 27 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “Withholding from a prisoner an esoteric medical treatment that only the wealthy can afford does not strike us as a form of cruel and unusual punishment. It is not unusual; and we cannot see what is cruel about refusing a benefit to a person who could not have obtained the benefit if he had refrained from committing crimes. We do not want transsexuals committing crimes because it is the only route to obtaining a cure. It is not the cost per se that drives this conclusion. For life-threatening or crippling conditions, Medicaid and other public-aid, insurance, and charity programs authorize treatments that often exceed $100,000. Gender dysphoria is not, at least not yet, generally considered a severe enough condition to warrant expensive treatment at the expense of others than the person suffering from it. That being so, making the treatment a constitutional duty of prisons would give prisoners a degree of medical care that they could not obtain if they obeyed the law.”

   3 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. Kosilek v. Maloney · 712 F. Supp. 2d 830 - Fields v. Smith

2. “The cure for the male transsexual consists not of psychiatric treatment designed to make the patient content with his biological sexual identity — that doesn’t work — but of estrogen therapy designed to create the secondary sexual characteristics of a woman followed by the surgical removal of the genitals and the construction of a vagina-substitute out of penile tissue. Someone eager to undergo this mutilation is plainly suffering from a profound psychiatric disorder.”

   3 later decisions quote this exact passage
   e.g. 712 F. Supp. 2d 830 - Fields v. Smith · 711 F. Supp. 2d 874 - Konitzer v. Frank

3. “Yet it does not follow that prisons have a duty to authorize the hormonal and surgical procedures that in most eases would be necessary to “cure” a prisoner’s gender dysphoria. Those procedures are expensive and protracted.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Kosilek v. Maloney