Morales v. Jones’s Empirical Analysis
494 F.3d 590 · 2007
Citation profile
14 federal appellate · 5 district · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 36 later decisions (2 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2022 · most notably 134 S. Ct. 2369 - Lane v. Franks (2014), Lane v. Franks (2014)
14 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
Applies 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205 Will County Illinois · Connick v. Myers · Garcetti v. Ceballos · Rankin v. McPherson · Givhan v. Western Line Consolidated School District
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 36 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Two final points warrant mentioning. First, as indicated above, the parties in this case do not dispute that Ceballos wrote his disposition memo pursuant to his employment duties. We thus have no occasion to articulate a comprehensive framework for defining the scope of an employee’s duties in cases where there is room for serious debate. .We reject, however, the suggestion that employers can restrict employees’ rights by creating excessively broad job- descriptions. See post, at 1965, n.2 (SOUTER, J., dissenting). The proper inquiry is a practical one. Formal job descriptions often bear little resemblance to the duties an employee actually is expected to perform, and the listing of a given task in an employee’s written job description is neither necessary nor sufficient to demonstrate that conducting the task is within the scope of the employee’s professional duties for First Amendment purposes. 3”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Dahlia v. Rodriguez“[the plaintiff] did not act as a citizen when he went about conducting his daily professional activities, such as supervising attorneys, investigating charges, and preparing filings. In the same way he did not speak as a citizen by writing a memo that addressed the proper disposition of a pending criminal case. When he went to work and performed the tasks he was paid to perform, [he] acted as a government employee.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrencee.g. Dahlia v. Rodriguez“Being deposed in a civil suit pursuant to a subpoena was unquestionably not one of Morales’ job duties because it was not part of what he was employed to do. Nonetheless, Morales testified about speech he made pursuant to his official duties and we must determine whether that fact renders his deposition unprotected. We hold that it does not....”
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.