In re Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc.’s Empirical Analysis
288 F.3d 1012 · 2002
Citation profile
41 federal appellate · 21 district · 24 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 187 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently June 2025 · most notably Warfarin Sodium Antitrust Litigation 02-3603 02-3755 02-3757 02-3758 (2004), 227 Ill. 2d 45 - Barbara's Sales, Inc. v. Intel Corp. (2007)
41 federal appellate · 21 district · 24 state decisions — followed in 14 states
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 Klaxon Co. v. Stentor Electric Manufacturing Co. · Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor · BMW of North America, Inc. v. Gore · Ultramares Corp. v. Touche · Lexecon Inc. v. Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach
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 187 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Because these claims must be adjudicated under the law of so many jurisdictions, a single nationwide class is not manageable. Lest we soon see a Rule 23(f) petition to review the certification of 50 state classes, we add that this litigation is not manageable as a class action even on a statewide basis. About 20% of the Ford Explorers were shipped without Firestone tires. The Firestone tires supplied with the majority of the vehicles were recalled at different times; they may well have differed in their propensity to fail, and this would require sub-subclassing among those owners of Ford Explorers with Firestone tires. Some of the vehicles were resold and others have not been; the resales may have reflected different discounts that could require vehicle-specific litigation. Plaintiffs contend that many of the failures occurred because Ford and Firestone advised the owners to underinflate their tires, leading them to overheat. Other factors also affect heating; the failure rate (and hence the discount) may have been higher in Arizona than in Alaska. Of those vehicles that have not yet been resold, some will be resold in the future (by which time the tire replacements may have alleviated or eliminated any discount) and some never will be resold. Owners who wring the last possible mile out of their vehicles receive everything they paid for and have claims that differ from owners who sold their Explorers to the second-hand market during the height of the publicity in 2000. Some o”
15 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[n]o class action is proper unless all litigants are governed by the same legal rules. Otherwise the class cannot satisfy the commonality and superiority requirements of Fed.R.Civ.P. 23(a), (b)(3).”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Consider an example. Defendant sells 1,000 widgets for $10,000 apiece. If 1% of the widgets fail as the result of an avoidable defect, and each injury creates a loss of $50,000, then the group will experience 10 failures, and the injured buyers will be entitled to $500,000 in tort damages. That is full compensation for the entire loss; a manufacturer should not spend more than $500,000 to make the widgets safer. Suppose, however, that uninjured buyers could collect damages on the theory that the risk of failure made each widget less valuable; had they known of the risk of injury, these buyers contend, they would have paid only $9,500 per widget — for the expected per-widget cost of injury is $500, and each buyer could have used the difference in price to purchase insurance (or to self-insure, bearing the risk in exchange for the lower price). On this theory the 990 uninjured buyers would collect a total of $495,000. The manufacturer's full outlay of $995,000 ($500,000 to the 10 injured buyers + $495,000 to the 990 uninjured buyers) would be nearly double the total loss created by the product’s defect. This would both overcompensate buyers as a class and induce manufacturers to spend inefficiently much to reduce the risks of defects. A consistent system — $500 in damages to every buyer, or $50,000 in damages to every injured buyer — creates both the right compensation and the right incentives. A mixed system overcompensates buyers and leads to excess precautions.”
2 later decisions 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.