Bowens v. Knazze’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

8 federal appellate · 2 district · 2 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 23 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. ““It would require law enforcement officers to respond in damages every time they miscalculated in regard to what a court of last resort would determine constituted an invasion of constitutional rights, even where, as here, a trial judge — more learned in the law than a police officer — held that no such violation occurred. ****** So long as the defendant’s conduct stemmed from his reasonable belief as to the requirements of the law and was not unreasonable in any other way, he cannot be held responsible — under the standard of liability set forth in Monroe v. Pape—for the deprivation of plaintiff’s rights. ‘No one has a constitutional right to be free from a law officer’s honest misunderstanding of the law or facts in making an arrest’. Agnew v. City of Compton, 239 F.2d 226, 231 (9 Cir. 1956), cert. den. 353 U.S. 959 , 77 S.Ct. 868 , 1 L.Ed.2d 910 (1957). Thus, the action of a police officer cannot be tortious when the officer proceeds on the basis of his reasonable, good faith understanding of the law and does not act with unreasonable violence or subject the citizen to unusual indignity. The facts alleged in the complaint demonstrate conclusively that the defendant could not reasonably have foreseen that a deprivation of constitutional rights might have resulted from his conduct. Under such circumstances, the complaint must be dismissed.” 237 F.Supp. at 829 .”

   5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Klor v. Hannon · 95 Wash. 2d 822 - Hocker v. Woody

2. ““In order for the Civil Rights Act to apply, the acts complained of must result in a deprivation of rights secured by the Constitution. Under the general principles of tort liability, it is sufficient that a reasonable man would have foreseen this result. However, a subsequent determination that the officer’s conduct resulted in a deprivation of constitutional rights does not mean that the result was foreseeable and that the officer’s conduct was therefore tortious. “The Civil Rights Act created a new type of tort: the invasion, under color ■ of law, of a citizen’s constitutional rights. The test of tortious conduct in an ordinary tort case is, as a general rule, whether at the time of the incident the defendant was negligent, whether he failed to act as a reasonably prudent man. In such cases the judgment of negligence is based on a standard of behavior left to the determination of the community. The reasonable man is ‘a personification of a community ideal of reasonable behavior, determined by the jury’s social judgment’. * * * “In ordinary tort litigation, we allow a jury to find that a defendant committed a tort when, looking back to the event, it finds that the defendant acted unreasonably. A defendant may be found negligent on the basis of a determination that the conduct questioned in the civil suit violated a statute or ordinance (e. g., that the defendant was exceeding the speed limit). These judgments pose no problem because they are merely the application of genera”

   3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 95 Wash. 2d 822 - Hocker v. Woody · 263 F. Supp. 971 - United States Ex Rel. Diamond v. Social Service Dept.