Fernelius v. Pierce’s Empirical Analysis
1943
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 4 district · 57 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 66 later decisions — most recently December 2018 · most notably Stone v. Arizona Highway Commission (1963), Melvin Carter v. John R. Carlson (1971)
3 federal appellate · 4 district · 57 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 Michel v. Smith · Perkins v. Blauth · Doeg v. Cook · 5 Cal. 2d 226 - Brown v. Ferdon · Strickfaden v. Greencreek Highway District
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 66 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The neglect charged here was not that of the subordinate officers. . . . The neglect that is pleaded is that of the defendants themselves. The legal fault charged here as the ground of liability is directly and personally that of the superior officers (the defendants). Responsibility is not claimed to devolve up to them merely derivatively through a relationship of master and servant or principal and agent. The fact that the killer-officers were employees subordinate to the *Page 347 defendants is essentially material here, not for the purpose of tracing responsibility for their acts up to defendants through the ordinary principles of agency but rather as showing that the homicidal officers were in effect an instrumentality under the control of the defendants in the handling of which the defendants were given and charged with responsibility and power, and the question of proximate cause of the injury relates directly to the neglect of the defendants.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“But if it were known, as averred here, that there were persons who actually possessed and indulged such propensities, the deliberate toleration of such persons on a police force by those having such knowledge and the power and duty to remove them appears to be without legal justification. * * * * * * The law giving to a superior officer the power to suspend or remove subordinates would be little more than a contribution to the ego of the superior if it did not likewise place on him the correlative duty of vigilantly exercising that power in the protection of the public interest. — Feme lius, supra at 240-241 , 138 P.2d at 21 . 7”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.