Harris County v. DeWitt’s Empirical Analysis
1994
Citation profile
12 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 12 later decisions — most recently May 2019
12 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. § 1346 (Federal Tort Claims Act)
Relies on Feres v. United States · Dalehite v. United States · United States v. S.A. Empresa De Viacao Aerea Rio Grandense · Indian Towing Company v. United States · Commissioner of Internal Revenue v. Glenshaw Glass Company
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 12 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A ministerial act is one which a person performs in a given state of facts and in a prescribed manner in obedience to the method of legal authority, without regard to his own judgment on the propriety of the act being done. The distinction between ministerial and judicial and other official acts is that, where the law prescribes and defines the duty to be performed with such precision and certainty as to leave nothing to the exercise of discretion or judgment, the act is ministerial; but, where the act to be done involves the exercise of discretion or judgment in determining whether the duty exists, it is not to be deemed ministerial.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage“a governmental entity may be held liable for the torts of its employees if, among other things, the employee would be personally liable to the claimant according to Texas law. Conversely, if the employee is protected from liability under the doctrine of qualified immunity, then the governmental entity’s sovereign immunity remains intact.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the concurrence“The unique functions and obligations of a police officer have allowed such employees the benefit of official immunity from suit when their actions are alleged to be negligent, so long as their actions meet the three-prong test established for finding official immunity....”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
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.