Nesses v. Shepard’s Empirical Analysis
68 F.3d 1003 · 1995
Citation profile
31 federal appellate · 5 district ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 94 later decisions — most recently August 2024 · most notably Great Western Mining & Mineral Co. v. Fox Rothschild LLP (2010), Long v. Shorebank Development Corp. (1999)
31 federal appellate · 5 district ·
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 Heck v. Humphrey · District of Columbia Court of Appeals v. Feldman · Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co. · Dennis v. Sparks · Jones v. City of Chicago
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 94 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[Plaintiff] cannot show injury from the alleged conspiracy unless the decision ... was erroneous. For suppose that although there was this nefarious conspiracy his suit had no merit and so would have failed even if there had been no conspiracy. Then the conspiracy did him no harm.... To show harm and thus keep the present suit alive, [plaintiff] would have to show that the decision by the [state] court in his suit ... was erroneous, and that, it may appear, Rooker-Feldman bars him from doing. But the doctrine is not that broad. Were [plaintiff] merely claiming that the decision of the state court was incorrect, even that it denied him some constitutional right, the doctrine would indeed bar his claim. But if he claims, as he does, that people involved in the decision violated some independent right of his, such as the right (if it is a right) to be judged by a tribunal that is uncontaminated by politics, then he can, without being blocked by the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, sue to vindicate that right and show as part of his claim for damages that the violation caused the decision to be adverse to him and thus did him harm. Otherwise there would be no federal remedy for a violation of federal rights whenever the violator so far succeeded in corrupting the state judicial process as to obtain a favorable judgment. ...”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage“We do not think the preclusive effect of a prior judgment can be avoided by the facile expedient of claiming that the judge was a cat's paw of the winning party's lawyers,....”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“[I]t is unclear, to say the least, that the U.S. Constitution can be thought to forbid the operation of politics in state judiciaries .... Most state judges are elected, some in partisan elections; the inevitable result is the injection of politics into the judicial process; no one supposes that therefore the election of judges is unconstitutional. At some point politicization of the legal process might violate a litigant’s rights under the free-speech or due process clauses of the Constitution — the judge might be a political enemy of the litigant, determined to rule against him for his political views....”
2 later decisions 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.