Soderbeck v. Burnett County’s Empirical Analysis
752 F.2d 285 · 1985
Citation profile
109 federal appellate · 6 district · 5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 182 later decisions — most recently February 2021 · most notably SRI International v. Matsushita Electric Corp. (1985), Rascon v. Hardiman (1986)
109 federal appellate · 6 district · 5 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 Monell v. Department of Social Services of City of New York · Harlow v. Fitzgerald · United States v. Leon · Elrod v. Burns · Pierson v. Ray
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 182 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““We may therefore set it down as a condition of awarding punitive damages that the defendant almost certainly knew that what he was doing was wrongful and subject to punishment. Among the types of conduct that fit this description is conduct so contrary to our society’s basic ethical principles that it can safely be assumed to have been undertaken with knowledge that it was legally as well as morally wrong, including conduct that has come to be regarded as contrary to the modem civil rights, as well as the older personal liberties, of Americans.””
7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[y]ou cannot run a government with officials who are forced to keep [their] enemies as their confidential secretaries.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“the discharge of public employees on political grounds is not yet regarded in the light of something contrary to natural law; nor is it widely known in non-legal circles to be a federal constitutional tort or any other sort of tort.”
4 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.