Willhite’s Empirical Analysis
Citation profile
4 district · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 13 later decisions — most recently March 2026
4 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 Roadway Express, Inc. v. Piper · In Re James Kujawa · MHC Investment Co. v. Racom Corp. · Landscape Properties, Inc. v. Whisenhunt · United States Department of Justice v. Mandanici
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 13 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The district court did not investigate Van Sickle’s ability to pay such a large sanction, but Van Sickle did not express to the district court an inability to pay [the sanction]. If inability to pay [the sanction] was a concern for Van Sickle, it was his “obligation to raise that point before the district court, since he was the one who had that information.””
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.