Thomas’s Empirical Analysis
Citation profile
5 district · 7 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 57 later decisions — most recently October 2020 · most notably Thacker, Fleming v. City of Bridgeport (2007)
5 district · 7 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 Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth · Mathews v. Eldridge · Katz v. United States · Anderson v. Creighton
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 57 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Although it need not be the case that the very action in question has been previously held unlawful, in light of pre-existing law, the unlawfulness must be apparent.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“they are created and their dimensions are defined by existing rules or understandings that stem from an independent source such as state law.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“Immunity applies if reasonable officials could disagree as to whether the conduct violated the plaintiff's rights.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.