Martinez v. Colon’s Empirical Analysis
54 F.3d 980 · 1995
Citation profile
114 federal appellate · 216 district · 4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 383 later decisions — most recently March 2025 · most notably Patterson v. County of Oneida (2004), Rodriguez v. Doral Mortgage Corp. (1995)
114 federal appellate · 216 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
Applies 28 U.S.C. § 1331 · 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Board of Regents of State Colleges v. Roth · Anderson v. Creighton · Goldberg v. Kelly · Monroe v. Pape
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 383 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The under color of law determination rarely depends on a single, easily identifiable fact, such as the officer’s attire, the location of the act, or whether or not the officer acts in accordance with his or her duty. Instead one must examine “the nature and circumstances of the officer’s conduct and the relationship of that conduct to the performance of his official duties.””
38 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[t]he key determinant is whether the actor, at the time in question, purposes to act in an official capacity or to exercise official responsibilities pursuant to state law,”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The inquiry into the nature of a constitutional right for the purpose of ascertaining clear establishment seeks to discover whether the right was reasonably well settled at the time of the challenged conduct....”
4 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Mihos v. Swift · Jordan v. Carter
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.