Maestas’s Empirical Analysis
Citation profile
12 district · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 31 later decisions — most recently May 2025 · most notably VDARE Foundation v. City of Colorado Springs (2021), 757 F. Supp. 2d 1065 - West v. New Mexico Taxation & Revenue Department (2010)
12 district · 1 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 Mt. Healthy City School District Board of Education v. Doyle · Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205 Will County Illinois · Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois · Simms v. Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services · Howlett v. Birkdale Shipping Co., S.A.
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 31 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Adverse action in close proximity to protected speech may warrant an inference of retaliatory motive. But.temporal proximity is insufficient, without more, to establish such speech as a substantial motivating factor in an adverse employment decision. An employer’s knowledge of the protected speech, together with close temporal proximity between the speech and challenged action, may be sufficiently probative of causation to withstand. summary judgment. Other evidence of causation may include evidence the employer expressed opposition to the employee’s speech, or evidence the speech implicated the employer in serious misconduct or wrongdoing. On the other hand, evidence such as a long delay between the employee’s speech and challenged conduct, or evidence of intervening events, tend to undermine any inference of retaliatory motive and weaken the causal link.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“eausation-that is, that the constitutionally protected speech was a substantial motivating factor in the employer's decision to adversely alter the employee's conditions of employment.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“some forms of retaliation may be actionable under the First Amendment while insufficient to support a discrimination claim under Title VII.”
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.