McFall v. Bednar’s Empirical Analysis
407 F.3d 1081 · 2005
Citation profile
5 federal appellate · 6 district · 3 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 22 later decisions — most recently August 2025
5 federal appellate · 6 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
Relies on Strickland v. Washington · Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Anderson v. Creighton · Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205 Will County Illinois · Connick v. Myers
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 22 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The Court must first determine whether the employee’s speech touches on a matter of public concern. If it does, the Court must balance the employee’s interest, as a citizen, in commenting upon matters of public concern against the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees. If the first two prerequisites are met, the speech is protected and the plaintiff must show that her speech was a substantial or motivating factor behind the adverse employment decision. If the plaintiff satisfies all these factors then the burden shifts to the employer to show, by a preponderance of the evidence, that it would have acted in the same way toward the employee in the absence of the protected speech.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“Ordinarily, in order for the law to be clearly established, there must be a Supreme Court or Tenth Circuit decision on point, or the clearly established weight of authority from other courts must have found the law to be as the plaintiff maintains.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“The doctrine of qualified immunity, therefore, shields government officials performing discretionary functions from liability for civil damages arising from 42 U.S.C. § 1983 claims brought against them in their individual capacities.”
1 later decision 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.