Thornton’s Empirical Analysis
Citation profile
15 district · 5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 121 later decisions — most recently March 2025 · most notably Dias, 182 Wash. 2d 55 - Durland v. San Juan County (2014)
15 district · 5 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 Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth · Perry v. Sindermann · Baker v. McCollan · Migra v. Warren City School District Board of Education · Albright v. Oliver
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 121 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“An equal protection claim will not lie by 'conflating all persons not injured into a preferred class receiving better treatment' than the plaintiff.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[A] statute that grants the reviewing body unfettered discretion to approve or deny an application does not create a property right.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“At one pole, a state operating license that can be revoked only “for cause” creates a property interest. See, e.g., Barry v. Barchi, 443 U.S. 55, 64 , 99 S.Ct. 2642 , 61 L.Ed.2d 365 (1979). At the opposite pole, a statute that grants the reviewing body unfettered discretion to approve or deny an application does not create a property right. See, e.g., Jacobson v. Hannifin, 627 F.2d 177, 180 (9th Cir.1980). Whether a statute creates a property interest in the renewal of an existing operating license falls somewhere in the middle of those extremes. The answer to that question depends on “the extent to which the [governing] statute contains mandatory language that restricts the discretion of the [reviewing body] to deny [renewal] to applicants who claim to meet” the statutory requirements. Id. In other words, if the governing statute directs that a license shall be renewed upon compliance with certain criteria, none of which involve the exercise of discretion by the reviewing body, the licensee has a property right in the reissuance of the license. See Stauch v. City of Columbia Heights, 212 F.3d 425, 430 (8th Cir.2000); Foss [v. National Marine Fisheries Service], 161 F.3d [584] at 588 [ (9th Cir.1998) ]. Conversely, an applicant does not have a property interest in the renewal of a license if the reviewing body has discretion to deny renewal or to impose licensing criteria of its own creation. See Jacobson, 627 F.2d at 180 .”
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.