Rivera v. Minnich’s Empirical Analysis
1987
Citation profile
11 federal appellate · 103 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 140 later decisions (7 by the Supreme Court) — most recently July 2025 · most notably M. L. B. v. S. L. J. (1996), Bowen v. Gilliard (1987)
11 federal appellate · 103 state decisions — followed in 23 states
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 In the Matter of Samuel Winship · Santosky v. Kramer · Duncan v. State of Louisiana · Addington v. Texas · Lehr v. Robertson
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 140 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“putative father has no legitimate right and certainly no liberty interest in avoiding financial obligations to his natural child that are validly imposed by state law”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“the equipoise of the private interests that are at stake in a paternity proceeding supports the conclusion that the standard of proof normally applied in private litigation is also appropriate for these cases.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“At one end of the spectrum is the typical civil case involving a monetary dispute between private parties. Since society has a minimal concern with the outcome of such private suits, plaintiffs burden of proof is a mere preponderance of the evidence. The litigants thus share the risk of error in roughly equal fashion. In a criminal case, on the other hand, the interests of the defendant are of such magnitude that historically and without any explicit constitutional requirement they have been protected by standards of proof designed to exclude as nearly as possible the likelihood of an erroneous judgment. ... This is accomplished by requiring under the Due Process Clause that the state prove the guilt of an accused beyond a reasonable doubt. The intermediate standard, which usually employs some combination of the words “clear,” “cogent,” “unequivocal,” and “convincing,” is less commonly used, but nonetheless ‘is no stranger to the civil law.’ One typical use of the standard is in civil cases involving allegations of fraud or some other quasi-criminal wrongdoing by the defendant. The interests at stake in those cases are deemed to be more substantial than mere loss of money and some jurisdictions accordingly reduce the risk to the defendant of having his reputation tarnished erroneously by increasing the plaintiffs burden of proof. Similarly, this Court has used the “clear, unequivocal and convincing” standard of proof to protect particularly important individual interests in v”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissent
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.