Kelly’s Empirical Analysis
Citation profile
2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 17 later decisions — most recently July 2025
2 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 Cohen v. Beneficial Industrial Loan Corp. · Mitchell v. Forsyth · Kerr v. United States Dist. Court for Northern Dist. of Cal. · Briscoe v. W · Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority v. Metcalf & Eddy, Inc.
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 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Official immunity seeks to protect the ability of an official to exercise discretion in accomplishing public tasks and to prevent the official from spending time in court defending actions that are reasonably thought to be legal. Without interlocutory appeal from district court denials of immunity, the official, by spending more time than necessary to defend himself or herself in an action, would spend less time on the tasks for which he or she was hired and cost the public additional money in defending a suit that should have been dismissed. The lack of speedy resolution of the claim also threatens the official’s decisiveness in taking action while the action is proceeding to trial.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“strengthens the substantial public interest of having witnesses come forward and testify truthfully ... but lack of interlocutory appeal from denials of witness immunity does not 'imperil [this] substantial public interest.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Maggard v. Kinney“that denials of all forms of absolute immunity, regardless of the function that the invoking litigant served, were immediately appealable.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Maggard v. Kinney
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.