Davis v. McKinney’s Empirical Analysis
518 F.3d 304 · 2008
Citation profile
28 federal appellate · 12 district · 4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 119 later decisions — most recently January 2025 · most notably Weintraub v. Board of Education (2010), Handy-Clay v. City of Memphis (2012)
28 federal appellate · 12 district · 4 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 Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205 Will County Illinois · Connick v. Myers · Garcetti v. Ceballos · Givhan v. Western Line Consolidated School District · Waters v. Churchill
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 119 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Cases from other circuits are consistent in holding that when a public employee raises complaints or concerns up the chain of command at his workplace about his job duties, that speech is undertaken in the course of performing his job.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Activities undertaken in the course of performing one's job are activities pursuant to official duties_”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“If however a public employee takes his job concerns to persons outside the work place in addition to raising them up the chain of command at his workplace, then those external communications are ordinarily not made as an employee, but as a citizen.”
2 later decisions 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.