Bowers v. DeVito’s Empirical Analysis
686 F.2d 616 · 1982
Citation profile
168 federal appellate · 19 district · 29 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 372 later decisions — most recently July 2019 · most notably Balistreri v. Pacifica Police Department (1990), Morse v. Lower Merion School District (1997)
168 federal appellate · 19 district · 29 state decisions — followed in 14 states
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
Relies on United Mine Workers of America v. Gibbs · Paul v. Davis · Baker v. McCollan · Martinez v. California
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 372 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“We do not want to pretend that the line between action and inaction, between inflicting and failing to prevent the infliction of harm, is clearer than it is. If the state puts a man in a position of danger from private persons and then fails to protect him, it will not be heard to say that its role was merely passive; it is as much an active tortfeasor as if it had thrown him into a snake pit.”
91 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Although the decision to release [the offender] from prison was action by the State, the action of [the offender] five months later cannot be fairly characterized as state action. Regardless of whether, as a matter of state tort law, the parole board could be said either to have had a “duty” to avoid harm to his victim or to have proximately caused her death, we hold that, taking these particular allegations as true, [the parole officials] did not “deprive” [the] decedent of life within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. [The decedent’s] life was taken by the [offender] five months after his release. He was in no sense an agent of the parole board. Further, the parole board was not aware that [the] decedent, as distinguished from the public at large, faced any special danger. We need not and do not decide that a parole officer could never be deemed to “deprive” someone of life by action taken in connection with the release of a prisoner on parole. But we do hold that at least under the particular circumstances of this parole decision, [the] decedent’s death is too remote a consequence of the parole officers’ action to hold them responsible under the federal civil rights law. Although a § 1983 claim has been described as “a species of tort liability,” it is perfectly clear that not every injury in which a state official has played some part is actionable under that statute.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory ... subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States ... to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress____”
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.