Wilson’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

1 federal appellate · 12 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 50 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “the right the official is alleged to have violated ... must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right. The relevant, dispositive inquiry in determining whether a right is clearly established is whether it would be clear to a reasonable officer that his conduct was unlawful in the situation he confronted.”

   3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 667 F. Supp. 2d 591 - Bostic v. Rodriguez · 658 F. Supp. 2d 713 - Munn-Goins v. Board of Trustees of Bladen Community College

2. “Police officers are protected by qualified immunity when performing their duties within the scope of their employment insofar as their conduct does not breach “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known....” [Qualified immunity is an immunity from suit, and not merely a defense to liability.... In the case where a plaintiff alleges that a police officer has unconstitutionally used deadly force, the officer’s actions are judged on a standard of objective reasonableness-The “reason- ableness” of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. ... The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowances for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments — in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving — about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 114 F. Supp. 2d 437 - Little v. Smith

3. “It has long been established that the objectives of the Fourth Amendment are to preserve the right of privacy to the maximum extent consistent with reasonable exercise of law enforcement duties and that, in the normal situations where warrants are required, law enforcement officers’ invasion of the privacy of a home must be grounded on either the express terms of a warrant or the implied authority to take reasonable law enforcement actions related to the execution of the warrant.... [A]n objectively reasonable officer could not have concluded that inviting a television crew — or any third party not providing assistance to law enforcement — to participate in a search was in accordance with Fourth Amendment requirements .... A private home is not a soundstage for law enforcement theatricals.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
   e.g. Robinson v. City and County of Denver