542 F. Supp. 896 - Ecker v. Cohalan’s Empirical Analysis
1982
Citation profile
26 federal appellate · 6 district · 2 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 54 later decisions — most recently August 2009 · most notably O'Connor v. Steeves (1993), Arnaldo Jimenez Fuentes v. Honorable Jaime Torres Gaztambide (1986)
26 federal appellate · 6 district · 2 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)) · 42 U.S.C. § 1988
Relies on Mt. Healthy City School District Board of Education v. Doyle · Elrod v. Burns · Christiansburg Garment Co. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission · Branti v. Finkel · United Public Workers of America v. Mitchell
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 54 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““relative pay, technical competence, power to control others, authority to speak in the name of policymakers, public perception, influence on programs, contact with elected officials and responsiveness to partisan politics and political leaders [and responsibilities that are not well defined or are of broad scope].””
4 later decisions quote this exact passage“Though rarely lauded in party platforms and political speeches, patronage is a policy; the decisions whether to dispense it and how are policy decisions; and the patronage dispenser is among the most powerful of our political sachems. Failure to recognize this fact of political life would yield the paradoxical result that in attempting to curtail future patronage, the courts had merely entrenched existing patronage systems.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Stott v. Haworth“This restraint is unnecessarily magnified when public employees remain in doubt as to which positions are subject to the protection of the First Amendment and which are not. Similarly, lack of notice as to the scope of First Amendment protection of public employees hinders elected officials seeking to exercise their legitimate powers through the control of personnel.”
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.