Bell v. Johnson’s Empirical Analysis
308 F.3d 594 · 2002
Citation profile
35 federal appellate · 2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 113 later decisions — most recently March 2025 · most notably 5 Md. App. 230 - Harding v. State (1968), Fritz v. Charter Township of Com-Stock (2010)
35 federal appellate · 2 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 · Anderson v. Creighton · Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Products, Inc. · Graham v. Connor · Mt. Healthy City School District Board of Education v. Doyle
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 113 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(1) the plaintiff engaged in protected conduct; (2) an adverse action was taken against the plaintiff that would deter a person of ordinary firmness from continuing to engage in that conduct; and (3) there is a causal connection between elements one and two — that is, the adverse action was motivated at least in part by the plaintiffs protected conduct.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[T]his threshold is intended to weed out only inconsequential actions, and is not a means whereby solely egregious retaliatory acts are allowed to proceed past summary judgment.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Our discussion of the adverse action requirement in Thaddeus-X makes it clear that, in most cases, the question of whether an alleged retaliatory action poses a sufficient deterrent threat to be actionable will not be amenable to resolution as a matter of law.”
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.