Wright v. Illinois Department of Children & Family Services’s Empirical Analysis
40 F.3d 1492 · 1994
Citation profile
75 federal appellate · 7 district · 4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 170 later decisions — most recently February 2025 · most notably Bloch v. Ribar (1998), Bailey v. Floyd County Board of Education ex rel. Towler (1997)
75 federal appellate · 7 district · 4 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)) · 42 U.S.C. § 1985
Relies on Mt. Healthy City School District Board of Education v. Doyle · Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205 Will County Illinois · Connick v. Myers · Griffin v. Breckenridge · Siegert v. Gilley
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 170 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“the context in which the underlying dispute arose.”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[w]e do not doubt that the defendants may have been displeased by some or all of these activities, but, as we noted in O’Connor [v. Chicago Transit Authority], 985 F.2d [1362] at 1369 [(7th Cir.1993)], a plaintiff may not sustain her burden “simply by showing that the elimination of the protected activity may have been welcomed by the defendants,” nor can we typically draw strong conclusions from the mere fact that protected speech may have preceded an adverse employment decision.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[S]urely an employee summoned to give sworn testimony in a judicial proceeding has a compelling interest in testifying truthfully and the government employer can have an offsetting interest in preventing her from doing so only in the rarest of cases.”
4 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.