Thompson v. Connick’s Empirical Analysis
578 F.3d 293 · 2009
Citation profile
6 federal appellate ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 17 later decisions (4 by the Supreme Court) — most recently February 2024
6 federal appellate ·
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))
Relies on Brady v. State of Maryland · Monell v. Department of Social Services of City of New York · Estelle v. Gamble · Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Products, Inc. · Farmer v. Brennan
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 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Training is what differentiates attorneys from average public employees. A public employer is entitled to assume that attorneys will abide by the standards of the profession, which include both ethical and practical requirements. Thus, prosecutors are personally responsible as professionals to know what Brady entails and when to perform legal research to understand the “gray areas.” To hold a public employer liable for failing to train professionals in their profession is an awkward theory. By analogy, it is highly unlikely that a municipality could be held liable for failing to train a doctor it employed in diagnostic nuances.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“must be more than a mere 'but for' coupling .... [It] must be the actual cause of the constitutional violation”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. Sanchez v. Gomez
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.