Nathan Breeden v. Hunter P. Jackson’s Empirical Analysis
457 F.2d 578 · 1972
Citation profile
24 federal appellate · 5 district · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 62 later decisions — most recently August 1990 · most notably Sweet v. South Carolina Department of Corrections (1975), Little v. Walker (1977)
24 federal appellate · 5 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 Conley v. Gibson · Haines v. Kerner · Townsend v. Sain · Lindsey v. Normet · United Gas Improvement Co. v. Continental Oil Co.
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 62 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““It may be that the prison authorities in this case could have arranged to provide the petitioner with less onerous conditions of confinement. Under the guise of protecting constitutional rights, however, federal courts do not have the power to, and must be careful not to, usurp the responsibility that rests with the executive branch for the management of prisons. It is only when the deprivations of prison confinement impose conditions of such onerous burdens as to be of constitutional dimensions that courts may intervene in prison management. So long as the rules of prison management are ‘not so unreasonable as to be characterized as vindictive, cruel or inhuman,’ so long as they ‘are necessary or reasonable concomitants of imprisonment’, so long as the regulations do not involve punishment or restraints ‘intolerable in fundamental fairness,’ so long as the rules are not exercised ‘in such a manner to constitute clear arbitrariness or caprice’, no constitutional rights are infringed.” Breeden v. Jackson, 457 F.2d 578, 580 (CA4 1972).”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[do not] amount to ... denials of equal protection of the laws.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority““So long as rules of prison management are not so unreasonable as to be characterized as vindictive, cruel or inhumane, so long as they are necessary or reasonable concomitants of imprisonment, so long as regulations do not involve punishment or restraints intolerable in fundamental fairness and so long as rules are not exercised in such manner as to constitute clear arbitrariness or caprice, no constitutional rights are infringed.””
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.