Felder v. Casey’s Empirical Analysis
1988
Citation profile
291 federal appellate · 133 district · 731 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 1,739 later decisions (37 by the Supreme Court) — most recently October 2025 · most notably Will v. Michigan Department of State Police (1989), Owens v. Okure (1989)
291 federal appellate · 133 district · 731 state decisions — followed in 48 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 Erie Co v. Tompkins · Imbler v. Pachtman · Wilson v. Garcia · Hines v. Davidowitz · Stump v. Sparkman
Cited together with Patsy v. Board of Regents of Fla. · Monell v. Department of Social Services of City of New York · Wilson v. Garcia · Howlett Ex Rel. Howlett v. Rose · Anderson v. Liberty Lobby, 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 1,739 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“'[T]he relative importance to the State of its own law is not material when there is a conflict with a valid federal law,' for 'any state law, however clearly within a State's acknowledged power, which interferes with or is contrary to federal law, must yield.'”
63 later decisions quote this exact passage“[i]n enacting § 1983, Congress entitled those deprived of their civil rights to recover full compensation from the governmental officials responsible for those deprivations. A state law that conditions that right of recovery upon compliance with a rule designed to minimize governmental liability, and that directs injured persons to seek redress in the first instance from the very targets of the federal legislation, is inconsistent in both purpose and effect with the remedial objectives of the federal civil rights law.”
12 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“frequently and predictably produce different outcomes in § 1983 litigation based solely on whether the claim is asserted in state or federal court.”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage
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.