Rakovich v. Wade’s Empirical Analysis
850 F.2d 1180 · 1988
Citation profile
224 federal appellate · 5 district · 19 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 443 later decisions — most recently August 2021 · most notably Act Up!/Portland v. Bagley (1992), Jones v. City of Chicago (1988)
224 federal appellate · 5 district · 19 state decisions — followed in 14 states
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. § 1983 (Civil Rights Act of 1871 / Section 1983 (Ku Klux Klan Act))
Relies on Jackson v. Virginia · Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Anderson v. Creighton · Anderson v. City of Bessemer City · In the Matter of Samuel Winship
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 443 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he contours of the right must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right.”
17 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Once the defendant’s actions are defined or characterized according to the specific facts of the case this characterization is compared to the body of law existing at the time of the alleged violation to determine if constitutional, statutory, or case law shows that the now specifically defined actions violated the clearly established law.”
10 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the dissent“[t]he contours of the right must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates the right. This is not to say that an official action is protected by qualified immunity unless the previous action has been held unlawful, but it is to say that in the light of the preexisting law the unlawfulness must be apparent.”
7 later decisions 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.