Robertson v. Fiore’s Empirical Analysis
62 F.3d 596 · 1995
Citation profile
15 federal appellate · 9 district · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 45 later decisions — most recently November 2014 · most notably Santa Padilla-Garcia v. Jose Guillermo Rodriguez Municipality of Mayaguez (2000), Goodman v. Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (2002)
15 federal appellate · 9 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 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Mt. Healthy City School District Board of Education v. Doyle · Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205 Will County Illinois · Connick v. Myers · Elrod v. Burns · Siegert v. Gilley
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 45 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“(1) that the employee works for a public agency in a position that does not require a political affiliation, (2) that the employee maintained an affiliation with a political party, and (3) that the employee’s political affiliation was a substantial or motivating factor in the adverse employment decision.”
6 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[t]he danger that employees will abandon the expression or exercise of their political beliefs to appease their supervisors is not diminished because a supervisor supports a different identifiable faction within a party as compared to a different party altogether.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“The constitutional prohibition against patronage derives from the coercive aspects of the spoils system which inhibit the rich political discourse protected by the First Amendment. Without the protection afforded by the Constitution, employees might forgo the expression of their political beliefs or artificially change their political association to avoid displeasing their supervisors. Such coercion, whether direct or indirect, is incongruent with a free political marketplace.”
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.