Harris’s Empirical Analysis
Citation profile
4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 51 later decisions — most recently January 2025 · most notably 873 So. 2d 970 - Harris v. Mississippi Valley State Univ. (2004), Haynes v. City of Beaumont (2000)
4 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 Monell v. Department of Social Services of City of New York · Anderson v. Creighton · United States v. Diebold, Inc. · Mt. Healthy City School District Board of Education v. Doyle · Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205 Will County Illinois
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 51 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(1) The Plaintiffs must suffer an adverse employment decision; (2) The Plaintiffs’ speech must involve a matter of public concern; (3) The Plaintiffs’ interest in commenting on matters of public concern must outweigh the Defendants’ interest in promoting efficiency; and (4) The Plaintiffs’ speech must have motivated the Defendants’ action.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“When a public employee speaks not as a citizen upon matters of public concern, but instead as an employee upon matters of personal interest, absent the most unusual circumstances a federal court is not the appropriate forum in which to review the wisdom of a personnel decision taken by a public agency in reaction to the employee’s behavior.... Whether an employee’s speech addresses a matter of public concern must be determined by the content, form and context of a given statement, as revealed by the whole record.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent“[W]hen a public employee speaks not as a citizen upon matters of public concern, but instead as an employee upon matters only of personal interest, absent the most unusual circumstances, a federal court is not the appropriate forum in which to review the wisdom of a personnel decision taken by a public agency allegedly in reaction to the employee's behavior.”
1 later decision 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.