Forrester v. White’s Empirical Analysis
792 F.2d 647 · 1986
Citation profile
28 federal appellate · 4 district · 9 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 62 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently March 2023 · most notably Forrester v. White (1988), DeLaurentis v. City of New Haven (1991)
28 federal appellate · 4 district · 9 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.
Appellate journey
Relationships
Applies 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act)) · 42 U.S.C. § 1988 · 42 U.S.C. § 2000E (§ 701 of the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964)
Relies on Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Mathews v. Eldridge · Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics · Mitchell v. Forsyth · Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205 Will County Illinois
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 62 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he only tenable rationale of absolute immunity is the need to protect officials from being seriously deflected from the effective performance of their duties,”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“[a]bsolute immunity is strong medicine, justified only when the danger of such deflection is very great.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“The evil to be avoided is the following: A judge loses confidence in his probation officer, but hesitates to fire him because of the threat of litigation. He then retains the officer, in which case the parties appearing before the court are the victims, because the quality of the judge's decision-making will decline.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. Forrester v. White
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.