Pitts v. Thornburgh’s Empirical Analysis
866 F.2d 1450 · 1989
Citation profile
29 federal appellate · 8 district · 4 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 61 later decisions — most recently February 2025 · most notably Williams v. Lara (2001), Veney v. Wyche (2002)
29 federal appellate · 8 district · 4 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
Applies 28 U.S.C. § 292
Relies on Celotex Corporation v. Catrett H · Bell v. Wolfish · Turner v. Safley · Procunier v. Martinez · Craig v. Boren
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 61 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“that issues of prison management are, both by reason of separation of powers and highly practical considerations of judicial competence, peculiarly ill-suited to judicial resolution, and that, accordingly, courts should be loath to substitute their judgment for that of prison officials and administrators.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“[E]vidence that invidious discrimination--the ultimate object of heightened scrutiny--produced or underlies the classification at hand would doom the [contested] prisoner policy [by] demonstrating its lack of direct and substantial relation to an important governmental interest.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[W]hen a prison regulation impinges an inmates' constitutional rights, the regulation is valid if it is reasonably related to legitimate penological interests.”
2 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.