Rollins v. Petersen’s Empirical Analysis
1991
Citation profile
2 federal appellate · 2 district · 55 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 62 later decisions — most recently December 2018 · most notably In the Matter of Rhone-Poulenc Rorer Incorporated (1995), 118 Wash. 2d 195 - Taggart v. State (1992)
2 federal appellate · 2 district · 55 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
Relies on 43 Cal. 2d 60 - Richards v. Stanley · State v. Knight · State v. Verde · Madsen v. Borthick · Ferree v. State
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 legislature’s abrogation of absolute sovereign immunity does not lead to the conclusion that the public duty doctrine has also been abrogated. Legislative recognition of a right to recover from one who has previously been immune from liability for tortious acts cannot logically be read as an elimination of the requirement that before one can recover damages from another, a tort must be proven. There must still be proof of a duty owed to the one claiming injury and a breach of that duty. Therefore, in the present case, as in any tort case, the proper mode of analysis is to first consider whether there is a legal theory upon which suit can be brought ... before considering the separate and independent question of whether the [governmental agency] is immune.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[I]t is meaningless to speak of “special relationships” and “duties” in the abstract. These terms are only labels which the legal system applies to defined situations to indicate that certain rights and obligations flow from them; they are “an expression of the sum total of those considerations of policy which lead the law to say that a particular plaintiff is entitled to protection.””
2 later decisions quote this exact passage“[t]he question ... presented [was] not whether [a] violation of [the state statute at issue in that case] [was] negligence per se ... but rather the preliminary question of whether the legislative standard imposes a duty recognizable in tort as the standard of a reasonable person.”
2 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.