Coates v. Johnson & Johnson’s Empirical Analysis
756 F.2d 524 · 1985
Citation profile
82 federal appellate · 13 district · 6 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 201 later decisions — most recently December 2019 · most notably LeBlanc v. Great American Insurance (1993), Aramburu v. Boeing Co. (1997)
82 federal appellate · 13 district · 6 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. § 1981 (Civil Rights Act of 1866) · 42 U.S.C. § 2000E (§ 701 of the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964)
Relies on McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green · Texas Department of Community Affairs v. Burdine · United States v. United States Gypsum Co. · International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States · Christiansburg Garment Co. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
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 201 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he focus in a class action is “on a pattern of discriminatory decision-making,” of which specific allegations of alleged discrimination may be a part, although not always controlling if the number of such instances is not significant. The class action “may fail even though discrimination against one or two individuals has been proved.” The pattern or practice claim may also fail — despite any statistical evidence offered by plaintiffs — if the defendant articulates a nondiscriminatory, nonpretextual reason for every discharge. On the other hand, the class claim does not fail just because the district court finds that the company has satisfactorily explained the discharges of the named class representatives and any other testifying employees. Since strong statistical evidence, without anecdotal evidence, may in some cases form a prima facie case, a defendant’s successful rebuttal of each alleged instance of discrimination weakens, but does not defeat, a plaintiff’s class claim. Neither statistical nor anecdotal evidence is automatically entitled to reverence to the exclusion of the other.”
8 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“bad faith destruction of a document relevant to proof of an issue at trial gives rise to an inference that production of the document would have been unfavorable to the party responsible for its destruction.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“[t]he greater the number of standard deviations, the less likely it is that chance is the cause of any difference between the expected and observed results.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence
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.