Buckley v. Fitzsimmons’s Empirical Analysis
1993
Citation profile
681 federal appellate · 297 district · 252 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 2,495 later decisions (16 by the Supreme Court) — most recently August 2025 · most notably Albright v. Oliver (1994), Hartman v. Moore (2006)
681 federal appellate · 297 district · 252 state decisions — followed in 30 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.
Appellate journey
reviewedHampton v. City of Chicago (from Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals)
Relationships
Relies on Miranda v. State of Arizona Vignera · Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Malley v. Briggs · Imbler v. Pachtman · Pierson v. Ray
Cited together with Imbler v. Pachtman · Burns v. Reed · Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Kalina v. Fletcher · Forrester v. White
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 2,495 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“the nature of the function performed, not the identity of the actor who performed it.”
114 later decisions quote this exact passage“A prosecutor's administrative duties and those investigatory functions that do not relate to an advocate's preparation for the initiation of a prosecution or for judicial proceedings are not entitled to absolute immunity.”
111 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[a] prosecutor neither is, nor should consider himself to be, an advocate before he has probable cause to have anyone arrested.”
35 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.