Burks v. Raemisch’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

9 federal appellate · 2 state decisions

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 68 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[The] contention that any public employee who knows (or should know) about a wrong must do something to fix it is just an effort to evade, by indirection, Mo-nell’s [and Iqbal’s ] rule that public employees are responsible for their own misdeeds but not for anyone else’s. Section 1983 establishes a species of tort liability, and one distinctive feature of this nation’s tort law is that there is no general duty of rescue. DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dep’t of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189 , 109 S.Ct. 998 , 103 L.Ed.2d 249 (1989), shows that this rule applies to constitutional tort law, as to private tort law, for DeShaney holds that a public employee who knows about a danger need not act to avert it. As we remarked in Richman v. Sheahan, 512 F.3d 876, 885 (7th Cir.2008), “there is an exception for the case in which [a public employee] is responsible for creating the peril that creates an occasion for rescue, as when, having arrested a drunken driver, [a police] officer removes the key from the ignition of his car, as a result stranding the passengers late at night in an unsafe neighborhood, and he does nothing to protect them”. But [Shicker] did not create the peril facing [Olive] or do anything that increased the peril, or made it harder for [Olive or Carter] (or anyone else) to solve the problem.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. 494 F. App'x 671 - Anthony Olive v. Wexford Corporation

2. “Public officials do not have a free-floating obligation to put things to rights, disregarding rules (such as time limits) along the way. Bureaucracies divide tasks; no prisoner is entitled to insist that one employee do another's job. The division of labor is important not only to bureaucratic organization but also to efficient performance of tasks; people who stay within their roles can get more work done, more effectively, and cannot be hit with damages under § 1983 for not being ombudsmen. Burks's view that everyone who knows about a prisoner's problem must pay damages implies that he could write letters to the Governor of Wisconsin and 999 other public officials, demand that every one of those 1,000 officials drop everything he or she is doing in order to investigate a single prisoner's claims, and then collect damages from all 1,000 recipients if the letter-writing campaign does not lead to better medical care. That can't be right. The Governor, and for that matter the Superintendent of Prisons and the Warden of each prison, is entitled to relegate to the prison's ... staff the [implementation of prison policy].”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. Wheeler v. Burgum

3. “Plaintiffs need not lard their complaints with facts; the federal system uses notice pleading rather than fact pleading.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage
   e.g. FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION, INC. v. Obama