Bond v. Utreras’s Empirical Analysis
585 F.3d 1061 · 2009
Citation profile
13 federal appellate · 1 district · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 37 later decisions — most recently March 2025 · most notably Ezell v. City of Chicago (2011), American Civil Liberties Union v. Alvarez (2012)
13 federal appellate · 1 district · 1 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. § 452 · 42 U.S.C. § 1988
Relies on Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife · Warth v. Seldin · Allen v. Wright · Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. · Kokkonen v. Guardian Life Insurance Co. of America
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 37 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he overwhelming majority of documents disclosed during discovery are likely irrelevant to the underlying issues and will not be 'heard or read by counsel' or 'by the court or other judicial officer,' " but public access is presumed for "materials that invoke 'judicial resolution of the merits' " (citations omitted) ). This appeal arose under a unique set of circumstances, and thus we keep our holding narrow in comporting with our own precedent. Alabama's lethal injection protocol may not have been formally filed under the rushed timeline of Hamm's approaching execution, but the protocol constitutes a judicial record subject to the common law right of access because it was submitted to the district court to resolve disputed substantive motions in the litigation, was discussed and analyzed by all parties in evidentiary hearings and arguments, and was unambiguously integral to the court's resolution of the substantive motions in Hamm's as-applied challenge to the protocol. 6 B. Common Law Right of Access After establishing that Alabama's protocol is a judicial record, we must now determine whether the district court abused its discretion in unsealing the protocol after finding it subject to the common law right of access. Generally, "the common-law right of access standard as it applies to particular documents requires the court to balance competing interests of the parties,”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“the public has a presumptive right to access discovery materials that are filed with the court, used in a judicial proceeding , or otherwise constitute 'judicial records,' " and noting that even discovery documents "used in a court proceeding”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“As long as there is 'at least one individual plaintiff who has demonstrated standing to assert these rights as his own,' a court 'need not consider whether the other ... plaintiffs have standing to maintain the suit.'”
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.