West v. Atkins’s Empirical Analysis
815 F.2d 993 · 1987
Citation profile
13 federal appellate · 3 district · 1 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 24 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently January 2018
13 federal appellate · 3 district · 1 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 28 U.S.C. § 1915 · 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Estelle v. Gamble · Haines v. Kerner · Lugar v. Edmondson Oil Co. · Polk County v. Dodson · Blum v. Yaretsky
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 24 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“the state will be free to contract out all services which it is constitutionally obligated to provide and leave its citizens with no means for vindication of those rights, whose protection has been delegated to 'private' actors, when they have been denied.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. West v. Atkins“in order to highlight the cooperative relationship between the doctors and the state and thus the absence of an adversarial relationship akin to that existing between public defenders and the state.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the dissente.g. West v. Atkins“Decisions made in the day-to-day rendering of medical services by a physician are not the kind of decisions traditionally and exclusively made by the sovereign for and on behalf of the public.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majoritye.g. West v. Atkins
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.