Wood v. Ostrander’s Empirical Analysis
879 F.2d 583 · 1989
Citation profile
211 federal appellate · 26 district · 33 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 426 later decisions — most recently May 2025 · most notably Morse v. Lower Merion School District (1997), Sutton II v. Utah State School for the Deaf and Blind 1-5 1-5 (1999)
211 federal appellate · 26 district · 33 state decisions — followed in 15 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 Harlow v. Fitzgerald · Anderson v. Creighton · Estelle v. Gamble · Mitchell v. Forsyth · Mapp v. Ohio
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 426 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“distinguish[ed] [the plaintiff] from the general public and trigger[ed] a duty of the police to afford her some measure of peace and safety”
9 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“affirmatively placed the plaintiff in a position of danger.”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“[w]hile the State may have been aware of the dangers that Joshua faced in the free world, it played no part in their creation, nor did it do anything to render him more vulnerable to them.”
6 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.