Morris v. Board of Estimate’s Empirical Analysis
831 F.2d 384 · 1987
Citation profile
5 federal appellate ·
How this case has been cited
Cited by 14 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently May 2012
5 federal appellate ·
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
Relies on Reynolds v. Sims · Avery v. Midland County · Whitcomb v. Chavis · Hadley v. Junior College District of Metropolitan Kansas City · Mahan v. Howell
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 14 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“"... [t]he design of the Board, which gives equal weight to each borough's interests, has devalued concomitantly the votes of individual residents of Brooklyn and Queens, and has grossly overvalued the votes of Staten Island residents. The result is exactly what the Equal Protection clause forbids: `the elevation of a small class of "supervoters" granted an extraordinarily powerful franchise'" ( id. at 393, quoting Brown v. Thomson, 462 U.S. 835, 856 , 103 S.Ct. 2690, 2703 , 77 L.Ed.2d 214 [1983] [Brennan, J., dissenting]).”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“seriously defective in the way it measures Board members' power to determine the outcome of a Board vote.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“precleared” by the United States Justice Department pursuant to § 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended, 42 U.S.C.A. § 1973c. . Board members from Districts 1 and 6 also had unexpired terms. Only Districts 2, 3, 4, and 5 elected members in 1988. . Weil and Barnett were the primary movers behind the half-vote solution. Weil moved for its adoption by the board, and Barnett seconded her motion. . The Weinribs previously sought to intervene in the Dillard litigation to complain that there was a possibility that the school board would adopt the shared-vote method as a solution to the problem posed by the settlement. This court found the Weinribs’ concern to be premature, and denied intervention. Now that the board has in fact done what they thought it would do, their concern is no longer premature. . District 7 is not one of the majority-black districts, and it is not the district with the significant black "influence.” There is therefore no issue of diminution of the black vote. . In the decision which the Supreme Court affirmed in Morris , the Second Circuit similarly reasoned that the population-based approach that the Supreme Court had taken in one-person-one-vote cases “is not itself flawless” and "is imperfect because it too must make assumptions that do not mirror reality.”
1 later decision 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.