Vinyard v. Wilson’s Empirical Analysis
311 F.3d 1340 · 2002
Citation profile
152 federal appellate · 3 district · 3 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 482 later decisions — most recently April 2025 · most notably Crawford v. Carroll (2008), Holloman ex rel. Holloman v. Harland (2004)
152 federal appellate · 3 district · 3 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
Applies 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Celotex Corporation v. Catrett H · Terry v. Ohio · Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth · 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 482 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“conduct [may be] so bad that case law is not needed to establish that this conduct cannot be lawful.”
22 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Qualified immunity offers complete protection for government officials sued in their individual capacities if their conduct `does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.'”
13 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“the next, sequential step is to ask whether the right was clearly established.”
8 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.