49 Cal. 3d 1107 - Walker v. State Bar’s Empirical Analysis
1989
Citation profile
40 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 41 later decisions — most recently October 2025 · most notably Matter of Addams (1990), 54 Cal. 3d 765 - Calvert v. State Bar (1991)
40 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 Lassiter v. Department of Social Services of Durham County North Carolina · 61 Cal. 2d 716 - People v. Woody · 24 Cal. 3d 22 - Salas v. Cortez · 11 Cal. 3d 210 - Emslie v. State Bar · 43 Cal. 3d 658 - Rosenthal v. State Bar
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 41 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The pre-eminent generalization that emerges . . . is that such a right has been recognized to exist only where the litigant may lose [or potentially lose] his [or her] physical liberty if he [or she] loses the litigation. . . . [¶] . . . [¶] In sum, the Court's precedents speak with one voice about what `fundamental fairness' has meant when the Court has considered the right to appointed counsel, and we thus draw from them the presumption that an indigent litigant has a right to appointed counsel only when, if he [or she] loses, he [or she] may be deprived of his [or her] physical liberty.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“Fundamental fairness sufficient to meet the demands of due process has never been held to encompass the right to assistance of counsel in State Bar disciplinary proceedings, under either the United States Constitution or the California Constitution.”
1 later decision 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.